🇮🇳 Sidharth Malhotra

Sidharth Malhotra was born on 16 January 1985 in Delhi, the younger son of a captain in the Merchant Navy and a homemaker mother. He has an older brother, Harshad, who works in the merchant marine. He grew up in a Punjabi household in Delhi, attended the Don Bosco School and St Mark's School, and graduated with a business degree from Shaheed Bhagat Singh College at Delhi University. He was good-looking enough by his late teens to be approached by a Delhi modelling agent, and he took ramp work seriously enough to walk the Lakme Fashion Week shows at nineteen.

He moved to Mumbai in his early twenties with the unfashionable goal of becoming a Hindi-film actor and the rational backup of continuing to model. He worked, on and off through 2008 and 2009, on a film called Vishal Bhardwaj's adaptation of Stardust — a project that died in development — and then, in a turn that he has said in interviews changed his life, he joined Karan Johar as an assistant director on My Name is Khan (2010). He spent two years on the Dharma floor, learning the working method of a major Hindi-cinema production house from the inside.

Karan Johar cast him in Student of the Year (2012) opposite Alia Bhatt and Varun Dhawan. The film launched all three in a single weekend; Malhotra, in particular, was the conventionally classical hero of the three, with the kind of profile that Hindi cinema had not produced for a decade. The reviews were mixed but the box office was decisive; the careers of all three were now real.

He spent the next several years working through the standard Hindi commercial-lead repertoire, with mixed results. Hasee Toh Phasee (2014) opposite Parineeti Chopra was a critical favourite. Ek Villain (2014) was a major commercial success. Kapoor & Sons (2016), a Karan Johar production directed by Shakun Batra, was widely regarded as the finest ensemble Hindi family drama of its decade; Malhotra plays the younger brother in a complicated three-act family piece and is unmistakably an actor at work in it. Brothers (2015), A Gentleman (2017) and Aiyaary (2018) were less successful.

By 2019 he had reset deliberately. He took a long break, worked with the director Vishnu Varadhan on the development of Shershaah, and rebuilt his physical and emotional preparation for the part. The film was originally meant to release theatrically in late 2020. The pandemic moved it to streaming, in August 2021, on Amazon Prime Video, and it landed in a particular cultural moment — an Indian streaming audience locked indoors for months, hungry for a particular kind of emotional release. Shershaah became the most-watched Indian film of the year on the platform, and the performance, by general consensus, was Malhotra's finest.

He married his Shershaah co-star Kiara Advani in a small ceremony in Jaisalmer in February 2023, in what was, by Hindi-film standards, an unusually private wedding. Their first child, a daughter, was born in 2025. He has been, since the marriage, more publicly settled than at any earlier point in his career.

He has continued to alternate commercial and prestige registers. Mission Majnu (2023) and Yodha (2024) put him in the increasingly crowded Hindi-cinema spy-action lane. Indian Police Force (2024), Rohit Shetty's first streaming series for Amazon, has become a long-running franchise vehicle for him. He has, like Varun Dhawan and Shahid Kapoor, become a leading man in his late thirties whose value to a production company is increasingly his ability to anchor a multi-season streaming project rather than just open a theatrical weekend.

He has spoken in interviews about the long, quiet years between Student of the Year and Shershaah, about the discipline of staying in shape and staying in the conversation when individual films were not landing, and about the specific decision to take, with Shershaah, a role that was not in any of the safe Hindi-leading-man lanes. The bet paid off. He has also spoken about wanting to do, in the next decade, the kind of older, slower work that Pankaj Tripathi and Manoj Bajpayee are now doing. Whether the commercial machine that produced him will let him is the open question of his next stage.