🇮🇳 Tiger Shroff

Jai Hemant Shroff was born on 2 March 1990 in Mumbai, the son of the actor Jackie Shroff and the producer Ayesha Shroff. His sister, Krishna Shroff, is now a businesswoman and MMA promoter. He acquired the nickname Tiger early; he has told the story, in print and on talk shows, that his mother used it because he would not stop biting people as a toddler. He grew up in the family's Bandra flat surrounded by Hindi-cinema royalty — Sanjay Dutt was a regular at the house, Salman Khan stopped by — but he has been clear, almost insistently so, that he was not interested in his father's path.

He attended the American School of Bombay and then went to football coaching camps in England as a teenager. He trained, from his mid-teens, in a wide range of martial arts: taekwondo, in which he holds a black belt, parkour, Silat with the Indonesian master Cecep Arif Rahman, MMA at the Stree gym in Mumbai, and gymnastic floor work. He has been open in interviews about being a shy and slightly awkward child, with a thin frame and a stutter, and about training as a way of solving both problems.

He turned down acting offers through his late teens because he wanted, he said, to look like an action lead before he played one. By twenty-three he weighed eighty kilograms of lean muscle, could do a standing backflip in any direction, and was ready. Sajid Nadiadwala signed him for Heropanti (2014), opposite the debutante Kriti Sanon. The film was a commercial success — it grossed about 100 crore rupees on a budget of 27 crore — and won him the Filmfare Award for Best Male Debut.

He followed it with Baaghi (2016), a remake-of-a-remake romance-action film in which his standing front-flip kicks went viral on the still-young Indian YouTube. The Baaghi franchise — Baaghi (2016), Baaghi 2 (2018), Baaghi 3 (2020) — became, over four years, the most lucrative action-driven Hindi series of its decade. Baaghi 2 grossed over 250 crore rupees worldwide and Baaghi 3, released two weeks before the pandemic-era lockdown, was on track to outperform it.

He was paired with Hrithik Roshan in Yash Raj Films' War (2019), an action two-hander that grossed over 470 crore rupees and was, at the time of release, the highest-grossing Hindi film of the year. The fight choreography — particularly a hand-to-hand sequence shot at a port in Lisbon — was widely praised as the most ambitious mainstream Hindi action of its decade, and the film's success confirmed Shroff as a top-tier action lead in a country whose action cinema had long deferred to the Khans.

He has, like several of his cohort, struggled to repeat the trick in non-action territory. Student of the Year 2 (2019), Heropanti 2 (2022) and Ganapath (2023) all underperformed. He has reset by leaning back into his strengths: Bade Miyan Chote Miyan (2024) opposite Akshay Kumar was a high-budget action film whose box-office return was modest but which kept him in the top tier of physical leading men.

Off-camera, he has been more private than most Hindi-film stars of his age. He has been in a long-term relationship with the actress Disha Patani — confirmed and then unconfirmed multiple times — and has been deliberately uninvolved in the social-media performance of celebrity that some of his peers run as a parallel job. He is close to his sister Krishna and the two have co-founded MMA promotions and gyms in Mumbai. His father Jackie has spoken in interviews about being, occasionally, a little overwhelmed by what his son can do physically.

By 2026 he is thirty-six, in the middle of a generational handover in Hindi-cinema action — Akshay Kumar in his late fifties, Hrithik Roshan past fifty, Salman Khan into his sixties — and he has positioned himself as the bridge between that generation and whatever comes next. Whether his career deepens into the kind of acting work his collaborators say he is capable of, or whether he stays in the very specific lane he has built, is still being decided. Either way, the technical floor for what a Hindi-film action sequence can do has risen, materially, because of him.