Madness of Toby: When Raj B Shetty literally gave sweat and blood for his film

Raj B Shetty recently gave audiences a glimpse of one of his looks in his upcoming film Toby, wherein he’s seen with wounds on his face with blood trickling down. The highlight of that look, though, was the massive nose ring that he sports in this segment. Raj had earlier told us that he wanted it to be authentic and so, instead of having a press-on nose ring, he went ahead and got his nose pierced for the same. When OTTplay had met Raj, he’d shown us the tiny puncture mark, which has healed well, so the assumption was that barring the pain of the piercing, wearing the nose-ring for the shoot would have been easy-going for the actor.

But no… in the making of video called the ‘Madness of Toby’ that he and his team released a while ago, we see the agony he went through for that sequence in the film. For Raj’s ‘Maari’ look, which comes towards the end of the film, he wanted to actually pierce his nose. The team thought that after piercing, they’d have a few days in pre-production, which would allow the wound to heal. But when the time came, it turned out that Raj got the piercing done in the morning of the day of the shoot and had to have the massive ring on thereafter, which, messed with the healing process, with the puncture wound becoming inflamed and painful. Even the slightest movement of his mouth would set off pain, so much so that after a point, Raj had to have painkiller injections to be able to proceed with the shoot. In fact, for the duration of that portion, Raj was not even able to eat solid food and sustained on juices, mostly.

Toby, directed by Basil AL Chalakkal, has been written by Raj based on a story by TK Dayanand. The film, which also stars Chaithra J Achar, Samyuktha Hornad and Gopalkrishna Deshpande in pivotal roles, is a revenge drama, which releases in theatres on August 25.