Ishaan Khatter: Playing the Part

HE’S THE GRAND­SON of writers Anwar and Khadija Azeem, and great grandnephew of writer and director KA Abbas. Not exactly the prerequisite for a young sex symbol who is not shy about taking his shirt off. But then Ishaan Khatter likes to make his own path. “I was raised by a sin­gle mother who had agency and gave me the freedom to make my own decisions from a very young age,” he says. The result: after two revelatory star turns in Netflix shows, The Perfect Couple and The Royals, the 29-year-old has got glowing reviews for playing a disenfranchised Muslim man in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Homebound, which premiered at the Cannes film festival this week, and is based on a 2020 article in the New York Times by author Basharat Peer called, ‘A Friendship, a Pandemic and a Death Beside the Highway’.

The Royals has given him the status of the internet’s boyfriend, and Khatter has embraced it, replying to comments on his Instagram and reposting flatter­ing posts with gratitude emojis. A sample of the comments: “Fizzy you make me dizzy.” Below a picture of a shirtless Khatter riding a horse, a comment reads: “Ninety Per Cent of the plot of The Royals”, and there are descriptions of him being “snackable”. Ask him about his new status as a dreamboat, and he says, “What can I say? I love all the love that is coming my way.” Homebound has re-established his credentials as a serious actor who can alter his accent and physicality to fit into a different world.

Khatter has been bubbling under since 2017 when he appeared in Beyond the Clouds, Majid Majidi’s gritty story of a young drug dealer in Mumbai. Filmmaker Karan Johar says he has been simmering for a while but now is at “boiling point”. “Ishaan is a spectacular actor who makes his characters seem beau­tifully organic. He is a chameleon and can go from thirst trap to raw and gritty effortlessly,” says Johar.

At the beginning of his career, Khatter was better known for being Shahid Kapoor’s younger brother—they have the same mother, dancer and actor Neelima Azeem, but different fathers. While Shahid is actor Pankaj Kapur’s son, Ishaan is Azeem’s son from her marriage with actor Rajesh Khatter.

With his shock of wayward curls, big black eyes, and wide smile, Khatter doesn’t fit the cheesy hero mould. His film after Beyond the Clouds, a more conventional drama with Johar’s Dharma Productions Dhadak, saw him play one half of a young Rajasthani couple fleeing their relentless persecutors. The film did well, but Khatter struggled with middling movies such as Khaali Peeli (2020) and Phone Bhoot (2022), despite getting the rare privilege of romancing Tabu in Mira Nair’s 2020 adaptation of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy for the BBC.

An actor’s life, as Khatter’s short career shows, is never his own. The Royals may have secured his place as a young leading man whom production houses will now bet on, but it wasn’t always so. A movie Abhishek Chaubey was planning on hockey maestro Dhyan Chand didn’t take off because of budget limitations despite Khatter having spent eleven months learning hockey. A big budget film that got greenlit, Pippa (2023), didn’t make it to a theatrical release during the pandemic. “So much in an actor’s life is beyond his control,” he says, adding, “you learn to take the blows as you go. Some things are out of your control, especially as a young actor starting out, the best I can do is be sincere in my work.’’ He hopes to collaborate with people who are taking the game forward.

Says Pippa director Raja Menon, “Working with a young actor on a big production is scary, so when I embarked on Pippa with Ishaan, I wasn’t really sure what I was getting into. He had to build the body language of a young army officer, find the mindset of a leader, live the duality of one who in his personal life is a bit of a brat but then takes on the responsibility to lead his troops in battle. Fortunately, I had chosen the perfect actor/person to portray Captain Balram Singh Mehta. Ishaan is a dedicated young actor who puts in every ounce he can into perfecting the portrayal of the part he is enacting and at the same time is fully open to direction.’’ Not only that, he adds, “Ishaan is a generous actor who works for the film and not just for him­self. He supports and applauds his fellow actors and wants to understand the tech­nicalities and craft of film-making. Pippa was special to all of us and not in a small measure because of the man Ishaan is. Personally, he is very dear to me, and I see a bright big future for him.”

There is nothing else he would rather do, says Khatter. “I never had an Option B,” he asserts. He says his family always taught him to be independent and individualistic. He recently found a short story by his grandfather written from the perspective of a couple in 1950s Mumbai, where the author kept switching from the man to the woman’s perspective, which he thought was progressive. “My mother was the first dancer in the family and introduced me to the world of classi­cal dance and music. She also showed me that films are not only for entertainment but also for storytelling and art. I was lucky to be raised in a household where I was encouraged to be my own person. I would give credit to my mom for that.”

He throws himself wholeheartedly into the film or series, little surprise that the show has been renewed for a second season. Says The Royals director Priyanka Ghose. “He is a gifted actor who does tremendous amounts of homework, but he is also a lovely man. It shows in his reading of The Royals’ character. On paper, Aviraaj is quite annoying, a reluctant maharaja and a believer in one-night stands. But Ishaan played him as vulnerable, desirable and loveable, drawing from himself.” Khatter says when they were shooting at the City Palace, Jaipur, they were lucky enough to watch the Maharaja (Sawai Padmanabh Singh) and the fam­ily go about their daily lives. “They were very gracious and hosted us on multiple occasions. That helped us pick up on the energy. We also picked up cultural cues and physical characteristics of other royals like the Prince of Brunei. Other than that it was just about find­ing the person in the Maharaja,” he adds. And a month and a half of training in riding and playing polo.

KHATTER DOESN’T QUITE fit the Bollywood definition of a nepo kid. He did one film as a child which starred his brother, Vaah! Life Ho Toh Aisi! (2005), but as a trained dancer from Shiamak Davar’s Institute for Performing Arts, becom­ing a dance instructor seemed to be an obvious step towards independence after school. Acting and dancing are almost one for him so he chose movies instead, becoming an assistant on the sets of Udta Punjab (2016), his brother’s film with Abhishek Chaubey, and then a chief AD with India-born Los Angeles-based Danish Renzu’s indie film Half Widow (2017). “Danish offered me the lead part, but I was just 18 and said I was too young but was happy to help in any other way,” he says.

“I never went to Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute or any formal theatre group. I wanted to join Motley with Naseeruddin Shah as an understudy but couldn’t,” says Khatter. “I was a film festival kid, at­tending everything from MAMI, to the International Film Festival in Goa to the Jagran Film Festival. I did that for about three years religiously before becoming an actor. I would watch six movies a day sometimes, so going to Cannes is quite a full circle moment for me,” he adds.

Chaubey says Khatter has always had a keen sense of cinema and its purpose. “It’s not just about fame or money or about it being a career. I think he’s built a perfect storm of star vehicles and things he really wants to do.”

This writer’s abiding memory of Khatter is from the sets of Johar’s Ae Dil Hai Mushkil when ‘The Breakup Song’ was being shot in Mumbai in 2016. Khatter adds, “That was when Karan [Johar] was planning a film with young­sters, and he called me to suss me out and check whether I was worth invest­ing in. He was shooting this song, and I asked if I could hang around the set. He was kind enough to let me. I decided to hang around on the set whenever he would let me.”

The humility remains but the poise has grown. So has the under­standing of cinema and the struggle of the actor’s life, having seen both his mother and brother up close. “My brother is my only sibling and was the one consistent male figure in my life,” he says. “He is 15 years older and has practically raised me in many ways. He’s even changed my diapers. He also took responsibility for me once he became a star and the main earning member of the family.” But he always pushed him into the deep end, Khatter says, “because he knows the only way to survive in such a fickle business is to figure it out for myself.”

He seems to have done right by his brother.

BollywoodHomeboundIndian cinemaIshaan KhatterThe Royals