Shah Rukh Khan may have regained his box office stature with three resounding hits last year, but one can't forget the slump he went through before that. In a new interview with Variety, the actor opened up on the box office failure of his 2018 film Zero and how he “just didn't want to act” post that.

Shah Rukh says he didn't want to act

Shah Rukh revealed that he was supposed to start a new film in January 2019, barely a month after Zero hit cinemas in December 2018. The film he referred to was reportedly Saare Jahan Se Achha, the biopic of Rakesh Sharma, the first Indian man to enter space. It was being directed by Mahesh Mathai and produced by Siddharth Roy Kapur's banner Roy Kapur Films. However, Shah Rukh now revealed why he walked out of the film in the eleventh hour.

“I called the producer and I said to him that I don’t want to work for a year. He said, ‘It’s not possible. You don’t sit without working for even a minute. So you don’t like the film, say no, don’t say you’re not working for a year’. And a year and a half later, he did call and he said, ‘I was really surprised you actually are not working’. So I just didn’t want to work. I just didn’t want to act. I didn’t feel like acting. Because for me, acting is genuinely very, very organic,” said Shah Rukh.

Shah Rukh said his exit was ‘unprofessional’

“I’ve always maintained that the day I don’t feel like getting up in the morning and conquering the shoot, I don’t want to work. It wasn’t the failure of the films, to be honest. I was doing a film in January, and this (Zero release) was in December. Very unprofessional of me. I just woke up and I said, ‘I don’t want to go and shoot this film,'” Shah Rukh added. 

Shah Rukh will be next seen in Sujoy Ghosh's King.