Vidyut Jammwal - The Outsider

Every generation produces a new kind of action star. Ours is Vidyut Jammwal, a trained martial artist in kalaripayattu, who’s built himself a strong and loyal following through his high-octane action films as well as his explosive – and frankly, insane – fitness videos on social media. Meet the actor who plays by his own rules

- Shikha Sethi

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.”