JACKET, SHORTS; BOTH BY URVASHI KAUR
“A horse is vegetarian, and it’s one of the most sculpted animals on the planet; an elephant among the strongest, and a deer among the fastest,” Vidyut Jammwal tells me over a Zoom call on a rainy Tuesday afternoon in August. “Where do they get protein from?”
If you’re one of Jammwal’s 4.8 million Instagram followers, you’ve seen him perform all kinds of superhuman feats – balancing his body facedown on four bottles, swinging a full gas cylinder like it was a toy kettlebell, doing push-ups with his palms facing backwards, skipping over water – without so much as breaking a sweat. Being vegetarian is clearly not getting in his way.
Repping a new breed of talent, Jammwal’s rise has dovetailed with the explosion of social media, a national obsession with fitness and a battering of old power structures that perpetuate the status quo. Jammwal has created a platform for himself and has used it, in part, to take a stand against nepotism in the Hindi film industry.
When his and Kunal Kemmu’s films (Khuda Haafiz and Lootcase, respectively) were left out of a leading streaming platform’s online event, fronted by a slew of established stars, to announce the line-up of its latest movie acquisitions – he tweeted: “A BIG announcement for sure!! 7 films scheduled for release but only 5 are deemed worthy of representation. 2 films, receive no invitation or intimation. It’s a long road ahead. THE CYCLE CONTINUES.”
This story is from the September 2020 edition of GQ India.
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This story is from the September 2020 edition of GQ India.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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