The Reluctant Superstar

IRRFAN KHAN 1967-2020

- SUHANI SINGH

There is a strange dichotomy that you are in a profession where you attract attention,” said Irrfan Khan in a conversation with Naseeruddin Shah for India Today TV’s Unforgettables show in 2016. “But I don’t like it when it comes to me. I want the attention to go to the character.” It’s a philosophy that Khan followed religiously throughout his 32-year-long career, which began with a bit part in Mira Nair’s Salaam Bombay! (1988). While his peers built an image playing a type, Khan built an enviable body of work by playing flawed, unheroic men. He was an anomaly—a star because of his talent.

Khan came to Mumbai, the “film mandi” as he called it, in the late 1980s after graduating from the National School of Drama in Delhi. He was not bitter about his over decade-long struggle though, most of which was largely confined to roles on TV. Work on the small screen was repetitive and too fast-paced for his liking, he would later say. Failure to land sizeable parts in films led to the setting in of an inertia. “It’s when I got bored of acting that an ease came in my behaviour,” he said to Shah. And it is that ease that he thrived on, it is what made filmmakers, both in India and abroad, cast him.

Khan’s first lead role came in British director Asif Kapadia’s debut film The