The Kids Are All Right

Born to movie royalty, the new generation of star kids is taking nothing for granted. Overlooking perks for some real work, ARJUN KAPOOR and ATHIYA SHETTY, two actors on the cusp of stardom, talk to UdITA JHUNJHUNwAlA about how they avoid getting trapped in Bollywood cliché

Bollywood star kids are like the Breakfast Club brat pack—part of an exclusive subset, they live by their unique rulebook. They are to the manor born and sprinkled with stardust, or so we would like to believe. Actors Arjun Kapoor and Athiya Shetty are card-carrying members of this inner circle. They’re young, confident and, thanks to their accomplished parents, well-schooled in the complexities of celebrity life.

We meet at Mumbai’s Mehboob Studio, where the duo are shooting promotional material for their July release. In March, the young co-stars of Anees Bazmi’s upcoming comedy, Mubarakan, spent time together shooting across the UK. They now share a playful banter as we settle inside Kapoor’s personalised vanity van, which features a memento of English football club Chelsea on one wall and posters of his favourite films (from Snatch to Rang De Basanti) on the other.

Dressed in a flowing kurta with comfortable palazzos, Shetty leans back against a blue wall and sips on a cup of coffee while nattering with Kapoor, who’s clad in T-shirt and sweats. As you might expect, there is a generous familiarity and candour between the 32-year-old son of producer Boney Kapoor and the 24-year-old daughter of actor Sunil Shetty.

Before working together on Mubarakan, they knew each other socially. “She’s known my sister for a while. It was a hi-hello-how-are-you acquaintance,” says Kapoor. As we begin talking about the pros and cons of the star-kid syndrome, Kapoor says, “Are you going to ask us about the N-word?” Shetty pipes in, “No, not that word!” Nepotism is the slightly notorious and extremely dreaded word of the moment in the film industry, but who better to acknowledge star-kid privilege and debunk Bollywood clichés than the two millennial stars?