Rajkummar Rao: The Unstoppable Everyman

IN HIS PREVIOUS movie, Bhool Chuk Maaf, Rajkummar Rao is stuck in a time loop, reliving his me­hendi every day. It is, as with most of his movies, tragic and comic. He is playing a small-town boy who has trouble finding a job, joining a long list of characters he has created, many memo­rable, of middle class, mid­dling young men struggling with both the expectations of their family and the aspirations of their own manhood.

The film has done well, making ₹75 crore at the box office, but Rao is aware he can do better. Which explains his next release, Maalik, a movie where a man believes violence is the only currency of power. It is brand new territory for Rao, 40, but he is an actor, not a trend chaser. “I don’t want to get typecast. People love me in comedies but also when I challenge myself. That is why I am keeping a mixed bag of films,” he says.

Fearlessness is in his DNA. It comes from having dreams out of propor­tion to his station in life. “We were 14 in one family and had one bathroom, but there were six of us about the same age so it was a lot of fun. There was a lot of emphasis on education,” he says. Young Rao was a part of a dance troupe that would do Bollywood and freestyle dancing, performing at events. He repre­sented Haryana in taekwondo—he is a black belt—and won a few gold medals, travelling across the country to partici­pate in tournaments.

His extracurricular activities got him into Atma Ram Sanatan Dharma College, Delhi, and Rao was off on his journey towards cinema. He would cycle every day for two and a half hours each way from his Gurgaon home to college and back, or sometimes take the Haryana Roadways bus. He would perform at the Shri Ram Centre for Performing Arts, and slowly fell in love with acting.

From there it was the Film and Tele­vision Institute of India (FTII), Pune, where direc­tor Tripurari Sharan had restarted the acting classes after nearly three decades. He cleared the tough three rounds— the written exam, the interview-cum-audition, and then four days of workshops on the FTII campus—and was one of 20 selected from a group of 80.

The class of 2008 is now the stuff of legend. It had Jaideep Ahlawat, a fellow Haryanvi, Vijay Verma, Sunny Hinduja, among oth­ers. For two years after graduation he would audition but find no work. “Initially I just wanted to be a hero, but at FTII I learned how much more there is to cinema, and then acting became meditative for me. How big it is, how deep it is, you’re exploring every day. Then I just wanted to be an actor,” he says.

He seems to have considered it all a great adventure. The two years before he found work were “great”, he says. How did he sustain himself in Mumbai, especially resisting the temptation of television? “My mother,” he says simply. “I didn’t need much but whenever I did she used to send me money, borrow­ing it from an extended relative,” he adds. “My mother was convinced that I would make it. I lost her in 2016 just two months after I became financially in­dependent. But one of my most abiding memories and greatest ac­complishments was when she saw me receiving my first National Award from the President. She was a big movie buff, a big fan of Amitabh Bachchan.”

The two and a half years at FTII expanded his understanding of cinema, introduced him to lifelong friends, sound designer Anish John, cinematogra­pher Dev Agarwal, as well as actor Vinod Rawat, and cer­tainly gave him flatmates for the struggle in Mumbai. Actor Gaurav K Sharma was his flatmate for a year at Yari Road, “where there were 18 FTII graduates in our building at one point,” says Sharma.

But after the first two years of jobless­ness, Rao’s ascent was steady, landing a role in Dibakar Banerjee’s seminal Love Sex aur Dhoka in 2010 after chasing casting director Atul Mongia who was conducting auditions. Soon after that he bagged the lead in Ragini MMS (2011). But then he did small parts in Shaitan (2011), Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), and Talaash (2012). It was Kai Po Che! (2013) which vaulted him into fame, with Amit Sadh and Sushant Singh Rajput for company. “Kai Po Che! put me on the posters,” he says, “It was a big UTV film. I could see myself on hoardings through­out Mumbai. It was a lovely feeling.”

By then Rao had understood the game. Keep your head down, associate with tal­ented directors, and let your work talk. He did a series of movies with Hansal Mehta, Shahid (2012), which won him a National Award; CityLights (2014) where he is an immigrant in Mumbai and met his future wife, his co-star Patralekha; Aligarh (2015) where he played the reporter bringing a tragic gay professor’s story to light in a visceral performance by Manoj Bajpayee; and Omerta (2017), where he played Omar Sheikh. It is an association that was mutually beneficial, with Mehta acknowledging Rao’s role in his life both profession­ally and personally.

Rao has also had the courage to switch gears even when he is success­ful at a genre. Horror com­edies were an untested genre when he did Stree (2018), which made ₹129 crore at the box office. Its director Amar Kaushik says he is forever grateful to Rao for his faith in the story. His character in the film, a tailor named Vicky (pronounced Bicky) who becomes attracted to a ghost, is the ideal young man, a talented tailor, a dutiful son, and a man happy to let the woman drive the relationship. The sequel, which made ₹625 crore at the box office, had him playing more of the same in 2024, to louder applause.

Kaushik calls him a saviour. “I think the whole world should work with him at least once. He makes the director look good. Maybe he prepares, but for me he comes as a blank page on set and then we all have fun. Writers do their thing, give their best dialogues, actors perform their best and take it to another level. I wanted to work with him in Chor Nikal Ke Bhaga when I was supposed to direct it in 2016- 17. That never happened. Then Stree came and the first person I thought of was him.”

The Stree franchise is in many ways the culmination of a career playing oddballs and outsiders. The obsessive blink-a-minute election agent in Newton (2017), the shy sari selling babua to badass in Bareilly ki Barfi (2017), and the Mithun Chakraborty loving simpleton in Ludo (2020). Each of his characters has dabbled in a different shade of humour, from subtle to laugh out loud, from sardonic to sen­sational. More than that, the characters have been indelible.

He is a child of the VCR revolution. Every Saturday the family would hire a VCR and binge watch movies. “During the 1990s, I would watch everything, especially Shah Rukh sir’s movies,” he says. He is also realistic about the film industry. “Everyone believes he can be the centre of the film’s universe,” he says, “but it is the other people who have to believe in it too.” He barely talks of the ‘struggle’ of outsiders: “The city has given me enough. The struggle teaches you a lot, Even after the auditions in the evening in the first two years, I would come home and do some improv work or work on my craft,” he says.

Success is the biggest pitfall, he says. How does he stay grounded? “In my case, I have some very important people who keep me the way I need to be, like Patralekha or my own upbringing,” he says. He has seen the struggle of his own partner, whose success has taken some time. “Being there for each other emotionally, physically makes a lot of dif­ference. You can only be there for her ups and downs as she has been with me. We met in 2010 and we’ve grown together. Still, I know she deserves so much more in her career,” he says.

This is his fourth home, his own finally, in Juhu. He is a red carpet regular. His face is on many posters. He is famous enough now to have to go theatres in dis­guise, his cap, mask and glasses in place. “I love the thrill of watching my movie with people because sometimes it is so unexpected what they react to,” he says.

He is not too taken by the celebrity life. “Instagram just came into our lives, cinema has been there for over hundred years,” he says. “I am an actor, I play characters. I don’t want people to know me,” he adds.

His director in Badhaai Do, where he played a closeted gay police officer in a lavender marriage, Harshavardhan Kulkarni, says Rao in­ternalises the character he is playing. His process is hidden. It’s a mystery especially for crucial scenes. When he enters the set, he brings a calmness and preparedness. He genuinely loves acting and perform­ing and that is so infectious.”

The student of cinema who joined FTII as a Bollywood fanboy is still wide eyed and enthusiastic. I still remember him with Patralekha, sitting respectfully at the edge of a group, listening in rapt attention for hours to Naseeruddin Shah in conversation with the late Irrfan Khan at an after party in 2016. You could almost see the alert intellect taking mental notes with two masters in conversation.

Like many artists, Rao is more com­fortable performing on screen rather than in person. And the industry is better for that.

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