Late actor Vinod Khanna and Shatrughan Sinha were at the cusp of their stardom when they both appeared in Gulzar’s directorial debut Mere Apne, and as expected, the two actors made their mark with the film. Here, Sinha played a villain against Khanna’s hero but it was the former’s belief that the director favoured Vinod over him “at the cost of the film”. The belief was so strong that Shatrughan did not even attend the premiere of the film. Khanna passed away in 2017.
In his biography, Anything But Khamosh by Bharti S Pradhan, Shatrughan recounted this discrimination that he felt and said that this “was not a misplaced feeling because Gulzar had done it at the cost of the film.” But Mere Apne did no disservice to Shatrughan as well and for that, he credited his own performance. “It was because of my own personality and my dialogue delivery that I still scored and walked away with equal honours, if not more. And I became a star after Mere Apne.”
But despite the differences that might have cropped up between the two actors during the filming of their first collaboration, Sinha held Khanna in high regard. He shared in his biography that there were only three personalities that he “greatly admired after coming into films” and those were Dharmendra, Kabir Bedi and Vinod Khanna. “Vinod Khanna was another person I admired greatly for his personality,” he said.
Vinod and Shatrughan stepped into politics around the same time and by this time, they had formed a friendship. Sinha told Dainik Bhaskar in an older interview, “After doing so many films, our relationship was not just restricted to reel-life, it was also there in real life” and added, “When Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister, both of us became ministers at the same time. There were a few people around him who tried to create a misunderstanding between us by saying that he was on a higher position than me.” But, Sinha shared, that these things did not bother Khanna.