Puneet Issar: The Coolie accident, six lost years and Duryodhan

One punch, one altered career

More than four decades on, the 1982 mishap on Coolie remains one of Hindi cinema’s most frightening on-set memories. Puneet Issar, then a 21-year-old actor signed as the main villain opposite Amitabh Bachchan, was filming a fight sequence in Bengaluru when a mistimed punch left Bachchan with a severe injury. Bachchan was rushed to hospital, underwent multiple surgeries and later recalled being “clinically dead for a couple of minutes” before doctors revived him.

Issar has always maintained that the blow was accidental. The consequences, however, were real and long-lasting.

The six-year halt

Speaking with Amit Bhatia, Issar said the aftermath stopped his career. Work dried up for six years, and he was dropped from films he had already signed. The roles he wanted stopped coming his way. “I didn’t get work for six years after that, but I became world famous,” he said. He also became known as “the man who almost killed Amitabh Bachchan.”

In an earlier conversation with Digital Commentary, he explained why the reaction was so sharp. People knew he was a trained martial artist and an eighth-degree black belt holder, and that seemed to overshadow everything else he had achieved. His gold medal from an acting studio and his work as a professor of language and diction faded from the conversation. “One second changed my life,” he said, leaving him with mostly fighter-type roles. To support his family, he took them.

Issar does not frame those years as blame. “That was my destiny; it made me stronger,” he told Bhatia.

Duryodhan, the comeback

The breakthrough came when BR Chopra’s Mahabharat was being cast. The makers had pictured Issar as Bheem, but Issar wanted a different, darker part. He asked to audition for Duryodhan. The team was surprised, but he insisted. The performance became one of the most remembered pieces of the series, and the tag “dusht Duryodhan” stuck.

• 1982: Coolie fight sequence goes wrong; Bachchan is critically injured.
• Aftermath: Issar says he went six years without the work he wanted.
• Mahabharat: He pushes to audition for Duryodhan, not Bheem, and lands the role.

Why it still matters

For audiences who discovered Issar through Mahabharat, the Coolie chapter can feel like a separate life. But the two moments are connected: the accident shaped the fighter image that limited his film offers, and the television role gave him a second public identity built on performance rather than one terrible on-set moment.

Source: The Times of India