You may take this as having come from the horse’s mouth. Apparently a scene was done for Sanjay Gupta’s ‘Shootout at Wadala’ last week that was more or less based on an incident that had reportedly taken place in November 2000 between Salman Khan and Aishwarya Rai. In it, John Abraham – who plays gangster Manya Surve, the first victim of a Mumbai Police encounter – appears drunk in the middle of the night outside the residence of his lady love Kangna Ranaut and creates a scene to be allowed inside.

This had apparently really happened when Salman and Ash were dating and she had moved out of her parents’ house to live by herself at Brook Hill Towers in Mumbai’s tony Lokhandwala Complex. Salman, who was said to be in boisterously high spirits, had woken up the neighborhood with his banging and shouting, and the incident had not gone down well in the couple’s tumultuous romance.

Now for Gupta’s film, a similar scene was enacted at a bungalow on Versova Beach Road in suburban Mumbai between John and Kangna, complete with neighbors being rudely woken up by John’s drunken intrusion. But, and this is the interesting part, John who is a near teetotaler reportedly agreed to get drunk especially for this scene.

The Bollywood hunk is rapidly getting into the method actor’s space and on Gupta’s advice, apparently put down a whole bottle of champagne to act drunk. While Gupta declined to discuss the antecedents of the scene, he did say, “When I half-seriously suggested that John hit the bottle for that sequence, he sportingly agreed. Since we were shooting near my house I sent someone over to get a bottle of chilled champagne. John finished it off before tackling the scene.” This, we must say, is one instance of the bubbly being popped before the reported triumph or success of any venture.