🇮🇳 Pankaj Tripathi

Pankaj Tripathi was born on 5 September 1976 in Belsand, a small village in Bihar's Gopalganj district, the youngest son of a Brahmin farmer who grew rice and sugarcane. The household had no electricity for most of his childhood and the nearest cinema was a half-day bus ride away. As a teenager he acted in village Ramleelas, playing female roles because the troupe was short on girls, and developed a taste for performance that survived even his parents' insistence that he train as a doctor.

He dropped out of a hotel-management course in Patna after a brush with student politics that briefly landed him in jail, then drifted toward theatre. In 2001 he was admitted to the National School of Drama in Delhi, the country's most rigorous acting conservatory, where Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri had trained a generation earlier. He graduated in 2004 and moved to Mumbai with about forty-six thousand rupees, no contacts in the industry and a wife, Mridula, who had agreed to support them by teaching school until he found work.

The first eight years were brutal. He shot one or two days at a time on serials, played the silent villager in two dozen films, and at one point seriously considered going back to Bihar. The break that mattered was small on paper: Anurag Kashyap cast him as Sultan, a coal-mafia foot soldier who introduces himself by inviting a rival to a slow conversation before stabbing him. The role lasted minutes. The film, Gangs of Wasseypur, played at Cannes in 2012 and Sultan's calm menace became, almost immediately, a meme.

What followed was a slow saturation rather than a sudden ascent. Tripathi worked in seven or eight projects a year through the mid-2010s, building a body of supporting performances — the cynical lawyer in Newton (2017), the bureaucrat-husband in Stree (2018), the comic uncle in Bareilly Ki Barfi (2017) — that made him the most reliable second name on a Hindi poster. Newton, which India submitted to the Oscars, won him a Special Mention at the National Film Awards.

The role that turned him into a household figure arrived on streaming, not in cinemas. When Amazon Prime Video released Mirzapur in 2018, Tripathi's performance as Akhandanand Tripathi, the carpet-trader-turned-gangster known as Kaleen Bhaiya, broke containment. He played a north-Indian don as exhausted middle-management rather than swaggering villain — a man tired of his own son, tired of his wife, tired of the inherited bloodshed of Mirzapur — and the show became one of the most watched Indian originals on the platform.

In parallel he carried Amazon's espionage drama The Family Man as the antagonist's foil and built a thriving second career as a leading man in mid-budget cinema: the title role in Kaagaz (2021), Madhav Mishra in the Criminal Justice anthology series, the deceptively gentle teacher of OMG 2 (2023). In 2023 he won the National Film Award for Best Supporting Actor for Mimi, playing a Rajasthani driver caught up in a surrogacy plot, in a performance critics described as the finest comic-tragic turn of his generation.

Off-camera he has remained, to an unusual degree for a Hindi star, the person his neighbours in Bihar would recognise. He still owns a small plot of farmland in Belsand and visits between schedules. He cooks for friends, often litti chokha, the smoky Bihari dish of stuffed wheat balls and mashed vegetables. He has spoken openly about his early years of poverty in Mumbai, about cooking on a single kerosene stove in a Goregaon chawl, and about the long discipline of waiting for the right part.

By 2025 he was anchoring Mirzapur's third season, headlining the political biopic Main Atal Hoon as former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and quietly turning down roughly half the scripts sent to him. He has said in interviews that his ambition is no longer to play big parts but to play small ones well. Hindi cinema, where the leading man has historically had to be loud, has found in him a model of a different kind of star — the one who does less, more slowly, and is impossible to look away from.