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Disclaimer: This is a source-based news story. There has been no official confirmation from the makers, and the casting detail reported below should be treated as unverified until announced by Luv Films, T-Series or the actor himself.
Just hours after the makers of Dada – The Sourav Ganguly Story dropped the film’s first-look poster on Sourav Ganguly’s 54th birthday, we may have our next big casting reveal. According to sources close to the production, actor Ritvik Sahore has been brought on board to play Sachin Tendulkar in the Vikramaditya Motwane-directed biopic.
If true, it is a casting choice dripping with poetic symmetry — and one that would give the film its most important supporting role after Rajkummar Rao’s Ganguly.
Why this casting makes almost too much sense
Here’s the delicious irony: Ritvik Sahore’s entire career exists because of Sachin Tendulkar. The Mumbai-born actor was famously discovered by a casting director at a shopping mall as a 12-year-old, and was cast in his debut film Ferrari Ki Sawaari (2012) precisely because the makers felt he bore a resemblance to a young Tendulkar — the film, after all, revolved around a boy’s Sachin-sized cricketing dreams and the Master Blaster’s iconic Ferrari. Fourteen years later, if our sources are right, Sahore graduates from playing a Sachin-worshipping kid to playing the man himself.
Sahore, now 25, has quietly built one of the more interesting résumés of his generation: young Omkar Phogat in Dangal (2016), the beloved Rajat in the long-running Flames series, Laakhon Mein Ek, Escaype Live and Super 30. He has the boyish frame, the curly mop and — crucially — prior cricketing screen experience that makes the reported casting feel less like a gamble and more like an inevitability the industry took a decade to notice.
There is one more thread connecting him to this project: Tanya Maniktala, his Flames co-star and on-screen partner across multiple seasons, has already been reported as playing Dona Ganguly in the film. If Sahore’s casting is confirmed, Dada will reunite two of Indian streaming’s most familiar faces — on opposite sides of the frame this time.
Why the Sachin role is the film’s trickiest tightrope
Make no mistake — in a Ganguly biopic, Sachin Tendulkar is not a cameo. He is the parallel sun. The Ganguly story is inseparable from the Tendulkar era: the record-shattering opening partnership, the 1999-2000 captaincy handover during Indian cricket’s darkest match-fixing winter, and the dressing-room dynamic of the early 2000s side that Ganguly rebuilt. Whoever plays Sachin must be instantly believable to a billion people who have watched every twitch of the original — the crouched stance, the nod, the squeaky-voiced humility. It is arguably a harder likeness test than Ganguly himself.
Our sources indicate the makers were clear they did not want a big star in the role — a recognisable face, they reportedly felt, would puncture the illusion. A well-trained, cricket-fluent actor who reads young on camera fit the brief. Sahore, who at 25 can still convincingly play a 16-year-old Mumbai prodigy as well as the mid-20s superstar of the NatWest years, ticks those boxes.
The caveats
Casting reports at this stage of a production — the film is dated for May 14, 2027 — are also known to change; actors are approached, tested and swapped well into pre-production. But if this one holds, Dada just found its second-most important player. And somewhere, a casting director who once spotted a Sachin lookalike in a Mumbai mall is entitled to feel very, very smug.
This is a developing story based on unverified information from industry sources. It will be updated upon official confirmation or denial.
