🇮🇳 Nawazuddin Siddiqui

Nawazuddin Siddiqui was born on 19 May 1974 in Budhana, a small town in the Muzaffarnagar district of western Uttar Pradesh, the eldest of nine children in a Muslim farming family. He earned a bachelor's degree in science from Gurukul Kangri University in Haridwar and went briefly to Vadodara to work as a chemist before drifting, by way of a Delhi theatre group, into the orbit of the National School of Drama. He graduated from NSD in 1996 and moved to Mumbai.

The first decade was as harsh as Indian acting careers get. He had bit parts in Sarfarosh (1999) and Munnabhai MBBS (2003) but spent most of his twenties watching films from the cheapest seats and surviving on roti and pickle in shared rooms. He once worked, briefly, as a watchman in Delhi to pay for acting classes. By his own count he played more than seventy uncredited roles before anyone in the industry knew his name.

Anurag Kashyap, again, was the inflection point. Kashyap cast him in Black Friday (2004) as one of the bomb conspirators and never stopped using him after that. The slow build culminated in 2012, when three films released within months — Kahaani, Patang and the two parts of Gangs of Wasseypur — gave him four distinct, technically dazzling lead and supporting performances and forced the Hindi-film press to confront the fact that the best actor in the country was a thin man with bad skin from a village no one had heard of.

What he did next is remarkable for its range and risk. He played a Kashmiri intelligence officer in Kahaani, a paranoid serial killer in Anurag Kashyap's Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016), a chess-obsessed photographer in The Lunchbox (2013), a Dalit revolutionary in Manjhi: The Mountain Man (2015), and the journalist Saadat Hasan Manto in Nandita Das's biopic Manto (2018). Each of these is the kind of role that, in Bollywood economics, no one builds a leading-man career on. He built his anyway.

Sacred Games, which Netflix released in 2018 as its first Indian original, took him global. Siddiqui's Ganesh Gaitonde, the Bombay gangster-philosopher who narrates the show from beyond the grave — "Kabhi-kabhi lagta hai, apun hi bhagwan hai" — became the line of dialogue that defined Indian streaming. The show was watched in more than 190 countries and made him the first Indian actor of his generation to be a recognisable face from Berlin to Brooklyn without having ever crossed over to Hollywood.

He has worked, also, in international cinema, with a small but pointed filmography that includes Patrick Graham's Ghoul (2018) and a supporting role in Lion (2016) with Dev Patel. In Hindi, he has alternated between commercial vehicles — Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) opposite Salman Khan, Raees (2017) opposite Shah Rukh Khan — and the harder character work that he treats as his real job: Photograph (2019), Serious Men (2020), Heropanti 2 (2022).

Off-camera his life has been more public than he would prefer. A bitter, prolonged separation from his wife Aaliya played out in court and in the tabloids through 2020 and 2021. He has spoken with unusual openness about depression, about the alcoholism of his early years in Mumbai, and about the long argument inside his own family over his caste, religion and choice of profession. His 2017 memoir, An Ordinary Life, was withdrawn after objections from former partners but remains the most candid book any leading Hindi-film actor has published.

By the mid-2020s he was past fifty and harder to cast in conventional commercial cinema, and chose instead to stretch in other directions: a Hollywood-adjacent thriller, two Italian co-productions, a directorial debut he has hinted at without committing to. His career, viewed as a whole, is the clearest argument in modern Indian cinema that the right face is the one that can hold a close-up, and that the only entrance fee is craft.