Jaideep Ahlawat is a different kind of action hero

 YOU SHOULD RAISE your status, not forget it," says Jaideep Ahlawat, playing a drug smuggler in the third season of The Family Man, up against the formidable and beloved super agent, Srikant Tiwari (Manoj Bajpayee). The words encapsulate Ahlawat’s own life. Since the advent of Paatal Lok during COVID in 2020, Ahlawat has become a star of streaming and much sought after in cinema, appearing in two-handers with actors from Ayushmann Khurrana in the cheeky An Action Hero (2022) to his old classmate Vijay Varma in Jaane Jaan (2023). His lanky figure is also a familiar one on the red carpet, but he remains the boy from Kharkhara in Rohtak, Haryana, his accent firmly in place during interviews, announcing his geography with secure pride.

Perhaps because of his long appren­ticeship in the shadows, after graduat­ing from Pune's Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in 2008, fame does not seem to have seduced him, allowing him to live in the limelight and yet stay out of range of the paparazzi culture. Instead, the focus in on work, the kind that has got him a loyal army of fans who can't wait to see what transfor­mation he undergoes next. If he put on weight to play the bumbling police of­ficer of Paatal Lok's Season 2, he grew his hair long for The Family Man, and for the lamentable Maharaj (2024) on Netflix, he worked out to be able to bare-chested through the movie.

For Ahlawat, acting has always been a state of mind, a product of teamwork, and a profound understanding of the word, both spoken and unspoken. In Season 3 of The Family Man, for instance, he plays a drug smuggler Rukma, a loner who works as an operative for powerful patrons in the Northeast, Nagaland specifically. He has no morals, no scruples and certainly no notion of patriotism. He lives for himself and his bank bal­ance, operating with his band of boys and staying under the radar. Until, he is persuaded to undertake a foolhardy adventure against the Indian state and seemingly in cahoots with China.

It is a role that allows him to be able to go head-to-head with one of his idols, Manoj Bajpayee, who plays the epony­mous family man. "We're both soldiers," he tells Bajpayee's Srikant Tiwari in a final face-off, while inviting him to sit. "I am nothing like you," snarls Bajpayee, upon which Ahlawat withdraws the offer and keeps him standing. Such sud­den cheekiness and moments of levity are now expected tools in Ahlawat's armoury but for the most part he stays away from star-like mannerisms.

Says Ahlawat: “When I was reading the script, I couldn't picture Rukma the way it is now. There was a picture in the minds of Raj and DK (the creators) on how Rukma should look. The character doesn't really care about anything. His detachment often gives out a vibe of him being inhuman, but he actually isn't so. Srikant can be labelled as the socially accepted Family Man, whereas Rukma is quite the opposite of that. He is an unacceptable Family Man.”

Ahlawat's career is studded with roles big and small, but always with impact. Whether it is Kubera, the deadbeat traffic policeman with a high-maintenance girlfriend in the SonyLIV miniseries Tryst With Destiny (2020) or Sudhir, the adulterous friend caught between an assertive woman and her embarrassed husband in Netflix's Lust Stories (2018) in the segment directed by Dibakar Banerjee, Ahlawat is a poet in an athlete's body. His characters surprise, sometimes even shock, as in the Netflix anthology Ajeeb Daastaans (2021). As Babloo, he is a tough guy but it turns out it is not his wife he loves but the man she wants.

Is he a hero or villain? It is a question often left hanging, as in Meghna Gulzar's Raazi (2018), where he plays Khalid Mir, Alia Bhatt's mentor-spymaster. Ahlawat remains true to his craft, as he has been in the years he was out of work as well, learning, reading, preparing: "The struggle is when you know the job and then land the job. Nobody put a gun to your head and asked you to join the film industry. It's cutthroat. You signed up for it. You have to keep yourself motivated and keep learning your craft. There's nothing that is out of syllabus for an ac­tor," he says.

Like many small town young men who came of age in the '90s, Ahlawat is a product of the VCR culture and his parent's reading choices. His late school teacher father would often rent a TV and VCR so that the family could watch movies such as Devdas (1955), Pyaasa (1957) and Mughal-e-Azam (1960) on de­mand. He would also bring home books such as Munshi Premchand's collected short stories. In The Family Man, his character Rukma is the son of a police constable who earned `12,000 a month and stretched it to cover the expenses of his three children—somehow it seems as if Ahlawat is speaking from personal experience.

Ahlawat studied in Kharkara until Class 10 and went to Jat College in Rohtak—where his school teacher sister still lives—for Class 12 and graduation. He then enrolled at Maharshi Dayanand University (MDU) to pursue a Master’s degree in English. In college he was a dancer who was popular in competi­tions. It was while in his first year at MDU, in 2003, that Ahlawat met actor Sunil Chitkara and decided that acting would be his life. By that time, he had given up the dream of joining the Indian Army, having not been able to clear the exams. “Jaideep had seen me perform Oedipus in some inter-college festival and told me, ‘Mujhe bhi yeh karna hai (I also want to do this)’. I helped MDU do a play, Shankar Shesh’s Poster, where Jaideep won the Best Actor award in the inter-zonal competition. Next year, we did another play, Jalta Hua Rath by Swadesh Deepak, and he won Best Actor again in the inter-zonal play tourna­ment,’’ recalls Chitkara.

Y THE TIME came for what's next, FTII was a clear destina­tion. Chitkara helped him crack the rigorous entrance exam and that is how he found himself in the acting department with classmates such as fellow Haryanvi Rajkummar Rao, Hy­derabad runaway Vijay Varma and Delhi engineer-turned-RJ Gaurav Dwivedi. Ahlawat has often talked fondly of those days. “You understand you have to start from zero, that you don’t know any­thing. But neither do your classmates. So, the solidarity and emotional connect is intense. You realise you’ve known each other from a time when you were trying to understand this art, and you’ve seen each and everyone’s truth. For them and yourself, you are forever that FTII student,” he says.

FTII opened his mind and heart to world cinema and the rest of his education was with Anurag Kashyap who cast him as Shahid Khan in Gangs of Wasseypur (2012) after bit roles that included playing Ranbir Kapoor's brother in Imtiaz Ali's Rockstar (2011). "FTII showed me a path to walk on, to realise what is right or what is wrong. I always find a solution in the basics. It's like going back to the NCERT (National Council of Educa­tional Research and Training) textbooks while preparing for the civil service examination," he says.

The rootedness has stayed with Ahlawat who is married to his FTII junior, Jyoti, who has left acting and now teaches dance and movement therapy with a vital Instagram presence. He has remained close to his origins. For the first 15 years of his life in Mumbai, he lived in a two-bedroom house and has only now bought two fancy apartments, adding to the recently purchased Mercedes SUV.

His life in Mumbai began in a one-bedroom flat with one batchmate, a student from the editing course at FTII. The number of inhabitants slowly grew to three, and then four, he recalled. “At one point, there were six of us in a one-bed­room apartment. But it was not a bad time or a sad time, just a bit difficult, in that we could eat only once a day sometimes.”

Ahlawat is still a member of the Maz­boot Actors Association WhatsApp group, founded when he and his friends were "struggling". He has learnt immense pa­tience over the years. “It has to keep you in the right frame of mind. You know, some things are necessary and have to be done, and some are not. The race is everyone’s, there’s nothing right or wrong," he says.

"Insaan ki tarakki uski bhookh main chhipi hoti hai (A person's progress is linked to his hunger)," Rukma says in The Family Man. With forthcoming movies such as Sriram Raghavan’s war drama ‘Ikkis’, Vipul Amuritlal Shah’s ‘Hisaab’, and Siddharth Anand’s ‘King’ with Shah Rukh Khan, Ahlawat's appetite seems insatiable.