There’s a popular misconception that Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai first met on the sets of Dhai Akshar Prem Ke in the early 2000s. However, their first meeting happened nearly half a decade earlier, long before Abhishek became an actor. It was around 1995 when the two crossed paths for the first time, not on a film set in India, but in Switzerland. Abhishek was working as a production assistant for his father Amitabh Bachchan’s production Mrityudata, and it was in the Swiss Alps that he first met his future-wife.
In a conversation with Nayandeep Rakshit on his YouTube channel, Abhishek recalled that first encounter vividly and shared, “I was on a recce for my father’s film Mrityudata, with Mr Mehul Kumar in Switzerland. I was sent by my mother because I had grown up there, I had studied in boarding school there, so they felt I might know the locales better. I was very friendly with Bobby (Deol), he was shooting for Aur Pyaar Ho Gaya, and the day we were on the recce, we came onto his set to say hello, and he was shooting with Aishwarya. It was the first time I saw her in person. I mean, we had already seen her during Miss World and all that.”
What followed was a casual evening that would unknowingly lay the foundation for something much deeper in the future. “That evening Bobby said, ‘Why don’t you come to my hotel and we’ll have dinner together?’ And I knew Mickey Contractor very well, he was doing her makeup and had done my mother’s makeup as well. He had seen me as a kid. So we were all sitting together, and that’s when I first met her.”
He recalled that during this dinner, Aishwarya did not understand anything that he said, because of his accent. “She tells me later that she didn’t understand a word I said because I had a very heavy accent apparently,” he recalled with a laugh.
Though their paths first crossed in Switzerland, their love story didn’t begin until years later. Abhishek proposed to Aishwarya while they were filming for Mani Ratnam’s Guru. He proposed to her using the same prop ring that she wore in the film. The couple got engaged in January 2007, and in April, they tied the knot.
