The Most Dangerous Role in Bollywood Has a Name: Lalit Modi
Some stories don’t come out in press junkets. They don’t come out in PR-approved quotes or carefully timed exclusives. They come out at 3:30 in the morning, in someone’s penthouse, over a satellite phone pointed at one of India’s most wanted men. Lalit Modi has been carrying one of those stories for over a decade. This week, sitting in his London home, he finally let some of it out.
The headline everyone’s grabbing is the biopic. Yes, it’s happening. The script is being developed right now, he told ANI, with a team assembled under Sneha Rajani, who spent years running Sony Entertainment in India before this. Modi says he’s already done hundreds of hours of interviews feeding into it. That’s a lot of tape. That’s a lot of life.
But the detail that actually stopped me wasn’t the biopic itself. It was who came knocking.
Ranveer Singh flew to London. Two years ago, out of nowhere, Modi gets a call. Ranveer wants to see you. Not a producer floating the idea, not a studio testing the waters. The actor himself. He came to Modi’s house, sat with him, and told him that if there was one role he wanted to play in his entire career, it was Lalit Modi as IPL commissioner. Modi didn’t pitch this meeting. Ranveer initiated it. That distinction matters, and Modi made a point of saying so. “It wasn’t me asking him.”
There’s something fascinating about that, and I don’t mean it in a celebrity-gossip kind of way. Ranveer Singh is the guy who became Bajirao, who became Kapil Dev, who just finished Dhurandhar. He doesn’t take roles because they’re safe. He takes them because they’re consuming. So the fact that he looked at Lalit Modi’s life and thought, that’s it, that’s the one, tells you something. It tells you the story is bigger than the controversy. Bigger than the IPL ban, the BCCI fallout, the years of exile.
Modi himself isn’t sure Ranveer is still available. “He’s become so big now,” he says, and there’s something almost fond in how he says it. Not bitter. Just realistic. But the meeting happened. That conversation happened. And whatever comes of the casting, the script is moving forward. Sneha Rajani’s team is building it. The story is being put on paper.
And then, almost casually, Modi dropped something else entirely.
He said he’s never told this story to anyone. Ever. Not once, in fifteen years of being in the public eye, through all of it, the tweets and the court cases and the tell-all interviews and the tabloid romance and Sushmita Sen and all the rest of it. He held this one back. And then this week, in the same breath as talking about Ranveer Singh and biopics, he let it go.
London. A fixer calls him in the middle of the night. Come now, meet this man called Baba, don’t ask questions. Modi goes. He’s thinking it’s something important, some business thing, the kind of late-night urgency that was probably a regular feature of his life back then. He gets to the penthouse. And Baba says they need an IPL team. Modi says he’s not even in India anymore, it’s not his problem, go buy one properly. And then Baba says, don’t worry about Dawood, I’ll fix that in a minute.
And then Baba walks out onto the terrace, takes out a satellite phone, and dials Dawood Ibrahim.
He puts it on speaker. Modi says he’s not talking. Dawood speaks anyway. “You are his friend, forget everything, it is all over.” Modi still refuses. He leaves. And what follows, he says, is a coordinated wave of pressure and retaliation that crosses multiple countries, eventually pulling in law enforcement.
He says the Dawood threat was one of the main reasons he never went back to cricket. Think about what that means, quietly. Not the BCCI politics. Not the legal cases. A midnight satellite phone call to one of the most feared names in organised crime was enough to make a man who built the world’s most profitable cricket league decide he was done.
He never said any of this publicly. Not once. And now it’s going into a script.
I keep thinking about the arc of this, the way the two stories sit next to each other in the same interview. The glamour of Ranveer Singh flying to your living room, and the horror of a satellite phone handed to you at 3:30 in the morning. That’s the range of Lalit Modi’s life. That’s why it works as a film. That’s why an actor with Ranveer’s instincts looked at it and said yes, without anyone even asking.
Whoever ends up in that role has got work to do. Because the man is complicated, the story is darker than most people think, and the truth, even the parts that just came out this week, is clearly still only part of it.
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Sana has been covering film, fame, and everything in between for over a decade. From red carpets to rehab rumors, she brings nuance, wit, and an insider’s edge to every story. When she’s not reporting, she’s probably watching Koffee With Karan reruns or doom-scrolling celebrity IG feeds.
