Afridi demanded to Humayun Saeed the Producer who took a boy rivaling his rise to stardom to cut an “obscene” scene where the hero hugs and kisses a girl in a nightclub shown in trailers on various TV channels.
The movie was released on Eid holiday weekend.
“I had given permission for the film with an aim to give kids some positive healthy entertainment, to divert their minds towards cricket and it should not have obscene things,” said Afridi.
“I want to tell the people that the film is not related to my life.” The $1 million Pakistan-made movie tells the story of a young man who dreams of becoming as great a player as Afridi, and the trials he faces as he tries to follow in his hero’s footprints.
Afridi, who bang to stardom in 1996 aged 16 when he hit a world record one-day international hundred off 37 balls, said he wanted the producer to cut the scene.
Formerly producer wanted to take Afridi in leading role but he refused the offer by saying it’s against his traditional tribes. Afridi belongs to Pakistan’s acutely conservative tribal district of Khyber on the Afghan border. Afridi protested in contradiction of the film’s promotional material that wrongly suggested he had acted in the film.
“A lot of kids and families would go to watch the movie because of me and if they see things like that they will feel bad, so I hope they remove those scenes and run the film,” he said.
The movie was expected to lift the flabby Pakistani film industry, which struggles to compete with ostentatious, big-budget Bollywood in India, although the movie suffered from technical hiccups.
