🇮🇳 Ayushmann Khurrana

He was born Nishant Khurrana in Chandigarh in September 1984, to P. Khurrana — a working astrologer and minor television personality — and Poonam Khurrana. He grew up speaking Punjabi at home and English at school. He acted in college plays at DAV College, then at Punjab University, and joined the theatre group Manchtantra. His break came through MTV Roadies: he won the second season in 2004 at age nineteen, a televised reality contest that included rappelling, ice baths and twenty-day road journeys. The win paid for film school applications he had not yet sent.

He worked through the late 2000s as a radio jockey at Big FM in Delhi and Mumbai, then as a VJ for MTV India and a presenter for the Indian Premier League. He sang on his own podcasts and wrote a column for The Times of India. He married his college girlfriend Tahira Kashyap in 2008. The two have written a memoir, Cracking the Code: My Journey to Bollywood (2018), about the in-between years.

Vicky Donor (2012) launched him. He won the Filmfare Best Male Debut and the song he co-wrote, 'Pani Da Rang', became a wedding-DJ standard. He spent the next three years in second-tier projects — Nautanki Saala!, Bewakoofiyaan, Hawaizaada — and was almost written off as a one-hit lead.

Then 2017 happened, and re-happened: Bareilly Ki Barfi, Shubh Mangal Saavdhan (about erectile dysfunction), and Andhadhun (Sriram Raghavan's blind-pianist neo-noir, 2018). Andhadhun crossed ₹450 crore in worldwide collections — over $46 million from China alone — and won the National Film Award for Best Hindi Film. He shared the National Film Award for Best Actor for Andhadhun with Vicky Kaushal for Uri.

He had, by then, designed an entirely new commercial register: high-concept Hindi cinema with a social-issue spine. Badhaai Ho (2018, mid-life parental pregnancy), Article 15 (2019, caste atrocity, his Anubhav Sinha debut), Bala (2019, premature balding), Dream Girl (2019, a man who works at an adult phone-sex line), Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan (2020, India's first major studio film with a homosexual lead couple), Doctor G (2022), An Action Hero (2022), Dream Girl 2 (2023), Article 370 (2024) as producer.

He has, between films, released studio singles ('O Heeriye', 'Yahin Hoon Main', 'Mitti Di Khushboo'), performed live across India and the Gulf, and written two books with Tahira. He was the only Indian on Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People list in 2020, cited specifically for his work in Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan.

His most recent work has been more uneven — Doctor G and An Action Hero underperformed, Dream Girl 2 partially recovered, Article 370 became a 2024 hit. He has admitted in interviews that he is recalibrating, conscious of the over-saturation of his own niche. He continues to live in Mumbai with Tahira and their two children Virajveer and Varushka.

His effect on the industry is harder to quantify than the box-office numbers suggest. Studios that had refused to fund films about taboo subjects — pre-marital sex, queer marriage, caste violence, single motherhood — now develop them as wide-release projects because Ayushmann has demonstrated a viable audience. Casting directors describe a 'post-Ayushmann pipeline': non-film-family actors with theatre and television credits, frequently from north-Indian small cities, being given lead consideration in mid-budget projects.

He sings on most of his own soundtracks — a habit unusual in contemporary Hindi cinema, where playback dominates — and his independent singles have moved from soft-rock romance into Punjabi and Sufi territory. He is also one of the small group of mainstream Hindi stars who write openly about marriage, fatherhood, his wife's cancer recovery (Tahira was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018), and the work-life arithmetic of the industry. The candour, by Hindi-cinema standards, is unusual; the loyalty it has produced, less so.

His upcoming slate continues the pattern: Action Hero 2, a long-discussed Aanand L. Rai romantic comedy, a streaming political thriller for Netflix, and a high-concept biographical project about an unnamed Indian sportsperson. He has also begun directing — a short, two-part Netflix special he scripted and partially shot himself. He has said, in conversation, that he wants to be remembered less as an actor than as a Hindi-cinema reformer who briefly cracked the wide-release ceiling open for a class of films, and a class of actors, that had been waiting their turn since the late 1990s. The argument is, by any objective measure, true.

His writing — two memoirs with Tahira, columns for Vogue and GQ India, and a small collection of independent poetry — has positioned him as one of mainstream Hindi cinema's most articulate leading men. He delivers convocation addresses at IITs and IIMs, lectures at Indian School of Business, and reads from his work at Punjabi-language literary festivals. He is also the rare Hindi-film star to have campaigned publicly for the Indian Cancer Society after Tahira's recovery. The fundraising — over four crore rupees by 2023 — has been routed through their joint foundation. He continues, in his understated way, to do small, exact, public good.