THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE

Ayushmann Khurrana consciously steers away from films that are an easy sell and instead, banks on stories that engage with the world and the ones we miss between the lines

- ARMAN KHAN

How do we critically reflect on the shape of our society? Are actors duty-bound to reflect the horrors of what we grapple with? Or, simpler still, are they just conduits of the singsong routine that many of us might associate the magic of the movies with? Ayushmann Khurrana’s last film of 2022, An Action Hero, engages with these questions, and boldly so.

On the face of it, the film can be summarised as a cat-and-mouse game between a local politician-goon (Jaideep Ahlawat) out to avenge his brother’s death from the actor, played by Khurrana, who accidentally killed him. But the film is more than what meets the eye, as is with most of his films. Before you know it, and when you least expect it, An Action Hero satirises everything from jingoistic news anchors, the pitfalls of fame, and the politics of how fans feel their stars owe them everything.

For Khurrana, working on these films was not a conscious choice. He didn’t want to stand out like a sore thumb, and do unconventional films for the sake of it. The genesis of this choice could be traced back to the wide-eyed wonder with which he’d watch the Bollywood stars of the 1980s on celluloid and the chasm with his street plays.

“I’ve always been a fan of commercial Hindi cinema, but I want there to be something topical and relatable in my films,” he says. “Although I was deeply impacted by commercial cinema, it was only when I started doing theatre that I realised a lot of the films in the 1980s did not have the themes that I was playing and supporting through my plays.”