Boman Irani & Om Puri Movies Together List — 5 Films

The shape of the work

The 2000s account for 80% of everything they made together. The 2000s belonged to Lakshya; the 2010s to Don 2: The Chase Continues. Boman Irani acted in every film; Om Puri acted in all of them. Strictly Hindi cinema — they never crossed industries together.

Partnership facts

• They first shared screen space in Kismat Konnection (2008), but neither was the lead. Boman played a sleazy builder; Om played a blind beggar. They had exactly one scene together — and it was so electric that the director, Aziz Mirza, told them both, 'You two need to do a full film together.' That conversation directly led to Maharathi (2008) being written with both of them as leads.
• In Maharathi (2008), Om Puri played a drunkard who stumbles into a bank heist. Boman Irani played the nervous bank manager. Om kept improvising slurred lines mid-scene, and Boman — a trained theatre actor — would react in real time, not break character, and feed Om new cues. The director said they worked like a jazz duo: Om set the rhythm, Boman harmonized.
• During the shoot of Don 2 (2011), Om Puri would sit with Boman Irani between takes and teach him Punjabi swear words. Boman, who is Parsi, later said Om made him feel like a 'real Punjabi brother' on set. They'd share a flask of chai and argue about which old Bollywood villain was better — Amrish Puri or Pran. Om always won the argument by saying, 'I'm named after one of them.'
• Boman Irani once said about Om Puri: 'He taught me that acting is not about the lines. It's about the silence between the lines. In Maharathi, he would just stare at me after a dialogue, and I had to learn to hold that silence. That's the best lesson I ever got.'
• The success of Maharathi (2008) — a small-budget heist comedy — directly inspired director Shivam Nair to cast both actors again in a similar two-hander. That film never got made, but the template of 'Om Puri as a chaotic drunk + Boman Irani as a tightly-wound straight man' was later copied in the 2012 film 'Chittagong' (where they didn't appear together). Filmmakers in Mumbai still cite their Maharathi dynamic as the gold standard for odd-couple casting.