There's More To Vicky Kaushal Than Meets The Eye

Vicky Kaushal would like you to believe he takes everything at face value – his own talent, other people, the business of numbers. But that doesn’t explain the breadth of his roles, his nuanced performances or his knack for backing a good script. It’s clear, the latest entrant to Bollywood’s big league has a lot bubbling beneath the surface.

- Shikha Sethi

Cole’s “Middle Child” cuts through the Marshall speakers at Studio No 8 at Famous Studios, Mumbai. “The Bentley is dirty, my sneakers is dirty/But that’s how I like it, you all on my d-----,” he raps, as Vicky Kaushal, dressed in an iridescent pink suit from Versace’s latest collection, grooves along, playing with the volume controls on the iPad.

The single, ostensibly about J Cole being “dead in the middle of two generations”, could well be a manifesto for new Bollywood, aka the brand of cinema that Vicky Kaushal and his generation of actors represent. (“All my contemporary actors have this passion to do better – than their last film, their last performance – to do something new. Everyone’s got the same energy.”)

Cole, an outsider himself – “I copied your cadence, I mirrored your style/I studied the greats, I’m the greatest right now” – famously camped outside Jay-Z’s office a decade ago before the hip-hop star agreed to listen to his demo, and eventually signed him as the first artist under his label, Roc Nation. Kaushal, too, occupied that no-man’s land between being an insider and outsider – until he broke through with the award-winning Masaan in 2015, in which he plays a young boy from Varanasi’s lower-caste Dom community fighting to transcend all odds.