BEFORE I ASK SUNIL GROVER A SINGLE QUESTION, HE ANSWERS ONE I DIDN’T KNOW I HAD.
By the time I sit down with him, the shoot has been unfolding for hours. Outside, Bandra simmers beneath a stubborn afternoon sun. Inside, blazers move between hangers, shoulders and changing rooms, assistants negotiate with disappearing daylight, and someone smooths the same lapel with painstaking precision, knowing the camera will notice what nobody else will. Magazine shoots have their own peculiar relationship with time. Nothing appears hurried, yet everybody is waiting—for the light, the next look, the next frame, somebody else.
I’m waiting too.
It is only after the shoot, almost absent-mindedly, that Grover looks at me and bursts into laughter. “Throughout the shoot, Manasvi was staring at me,” he says, slipping effortlessly into an imitation of my expression. “She was so tired and impatient, but she kept smiling so nobody would think she was grumpy.”
He is right. I’ve spent most of the day trying to look patient but he saw through it anyway. People often describe Sunil Grover as observant. Sitting across from him, that word begins to feel insufficient. Observation is recognising that someone is tired. Grover has recognised the effort it was taking to hide it.
For years, we’ve reached for the same handful of words whenever we’ve tried to describe him. Comedian. Mimic. Character artist. Every one of them is accurate. Yet each seems to explain the performance more convincingly than the person performing it.
Over the next hour, as we move from childhood to theatre, from comedy to craft, and from fame to identity, another portrait begins to emerge—one that has surprisingly little to do with punchlines and almost everything to do with the way Sunil Grover understands people.
LOOKING BACK, IT BEGAN WITH A CHILD’S INSTINCT FOR MIMICRY. BUT WHEN YOUNG GROVER’S IMITATIONS MADE PEOPLE LAUGH, THE IMPULSE TOOK HOLD. “I STARTED ENJOYING IT. I THOUGHT, I AM NOT DOING MUCH. I AM JUST COPYING WHAT THEY ARE DOING, AND EVERYONE IS LAUGHING NATURALLY. SO, I WOULD DO IT. EVERYONE WOULD LAUGH,” HE RECALLS.
Soon, he was participating in school competitions in Mandi Dabwali, a small town in Sirsa, Haryana, where he grew up. His father, a bank manager, rehearsed with him and gave him encouragement; an uncle introduced him to mono-acting.
In college in Chandigarh, his skill quickly made him popular, first in college and then across the university. It was there that he moved from simply copying people to inventing situations of his own to make people laugh. Mumbai, however, interrupted that certainty.
“I was a star in school,” he tells me, laughing. “Then I came to Chandigarh and after some time people knew me there too. But when I came to Mumbai...” He pauses for a moment before reaching for an image that feels unexpectedly poetic. “There were heavy clouds. I couldn’t see the stars.”
It is the sort of metaphor that escapes before you realise how much it contains. For a city that has been described endlessly through ambition, struggle and survival, Grover reaches instead for weather. The stars never disappeared. He simply couldn’t see them yet.
There was, however, someone who recognised his ability to shine: the late comedy legend Jaspal Bhatti, who gave him his first break on Full Tension. The exaggerated silliness of Pintu would later settle into the more self-assured comedy of the roles that made Grover a household name: Gutthi on Comedy Nights with Kapil, followed by Dr Mashoor Gulati, Rinku Devi and Pidu on The Kapil Sharma Show.
When I ask Grover about the creative process behind building characters that have become part of India’s cultural vocabulary, he stops me before I have even finished the question. “Leave it,” he says. Actors are often asked about a process, as though every memorable performance can eventually be traced back to a ritual, a method or a philosophy polished enough to be repeated in interviews. Grover, however, refuses to reduce his work to a formula. “You put a process in everything and calculate everything. But there are some things that come down to luck and become a hit. So, if there were a process for that, everything would be topnotch.” He pauses, then offers an answer that is almost disappointingly simple: “Love for your work.”
The extraordinary reach of his work is clear when you consider my own home: my grandparents know him, as does my younger brother, who is just six years old. Few performers have the kind of cross-generation appeal that he does. Part of his popularity may lie in how familiar his characters feel: they are people we know and meet. It could also be because he puts a little of himself into them. “These characters that I play, of course, have a reflection of me,” he says. “It’s my way of expressing myself, I would say, as I feel there are many emotions I cannot express as myself. By becoming somebody else, this profession allows me to experience them.”
The obvious assumption is that he must spend his life studying people. After all, how else do you create characters that millions of Indians instantly recognise? How does a woman from a small town, an overconfident doctor or a neighbourhood auntie stop feeling like a performance and begin feeling like somebody you’ve known all your life?
Grover doesn’t like that explanation. “I am not studying people intentionally. I just like to be around them,” he says. “My profession is this because I like doing this.” Everyone has their own qualities that you notice. “I don’t make notes. No, it happens automatically. It’s very natural, a gift.”
There is more to this gift than simply noticing. “Some people are rude. Some people are angry. But why is he angry? Why is this happening?” he says, instinctively looking for what lies beneath that initial reaction.
Later, I ask whether playing so many different people has ever made it difficult to reconnect with himself once the camera stops rolling. It is a question actors are often asked, and it usually produces some version of “I needed time to get out of the character.”
Grover smiles before answering. “When I watch myself, I don’t feel like I’m watching me.” He says there are moments when he looks at a performance and feels as though he is watching somebody entirely different. But the characters don’t simply disappear when the performance does. Asked what they have taught him, Grover says, “They have taught me a lot. When you create a character, you enter someone else’s mind. You try to understand him. But when you leave the character behind, he gives you something. His mischief, his emotions, he gives it to you.”
The characters don’t suddenly emerge in his everyday life. “It’s not like a biscuit in a box. I don’t live in a bag. I am not a bag. I am a human being. They [characters] don’t come out like that,” he says. It’s more an accumulation of emotions, impulses and ways of seeing that remain with him after he leaves the character behind.
So, the question of who he is when the character disappears is not as straightforward as it seems. Who is Sunil Grover when the wig comes off, the make-up disappears and the applause has found somebody else for the evening? “I don’t know what my real self is,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Who am I in Bulla’s life? I don’t know who I am. What is my real self? My real self is this, that I like to play characters.” Unlike his screen persona, he says, he is relatively quiet and more of a listener than doer in real life.
And he likes people who listen, too.
BY THE TIME OUR CONVERSATION CIRCLES BACK TO COMEDY, I REALISE I HAVE SPENT THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR TRYING TO CONVINCE SUNIL GROVER THAT THE WORD IS TOO SMALL FOR EVERYTHING HE DOES. ACTOR, PERFORMER,ENTERTAINER, SINGER—SURELY COMEDY IS ONLY ONE PART OF HIS ARTISTIC VOCABULARY.
He gently disagrees. “I think comedy is a very big word.”
“It is very difficult to make people laugh,” he says. “Anybody who can make another person laugh is doing them a favour.
“In all art forms, I feel comedy is one of the most difficult. So if someone asks me if I can do comedy, I feel the pressure of the word. I have immense respect and regard for people who can do it. They are blessed people.”
Does being funny make people assume things about him that aren’t true? “I think they think I sleep in a sari. I sleep in a T-shirt and shorts,” he says, with a laugh.
What comes with it, too, is the feeling of being loved. Fame, he says, has made him “public property” in a way that can be oddly intimate. “Anybody has the right to touch your shoulder and say, ‘Hey, Sunil, bhai, where are you going?’ Or ‘What’s going on these days?’” He has no complaints about their familiarity. In fact, when he sees their joy, he feels it too. “They have a right to know you, that happiness is what we work for. But I also feel that I know them,” he says.
The affection often comes with the expectation that he is always ready to perform. People have come up to him at airports asking him to sing, and while he doesn’t mind doing it, he’d like to gently chide them for not being aware of their setting. “See what’s happening around you. That is also an expression of your love,” he explains.
For him, comedy has never been about escaping pain or pretending it doesn’t exist. It exists because life is difficult, because people carry burdens that remain invisible until somebody, even for a few minutes, gives them permission to forget them. When I ask him how he continued making people laugh during the more difficult phases of his own life, he pauses for a moment before remembering something Javed Akhtar once said. “He said laughter is for the bad times. It is a shock absorber.”
Grover nods. “I completely agree.
“Of course it has an effect,” he says of bringing his personal troubles to work. “But you have to do this job. Because this is your job, you detach from everything.” There’s something fortunate about being able to do that through a profession he loves. “It’s not an escapism, but it does help me forget everything. Out of love for it.”
By the end of our conversation, I find myself thinking less about the astonishing precision with which Sunil Grover imitates people and more about the generosity with which he understands them. The impressions, the voices, the unforgettable characters—they are simply what the audience gets to see.
Sunil Grover may have spent his life becoming other people. What people have loved all along, however, is the uncommon kindness with which he has looked at them.
To read more stories from Esquire India's October 2026 issue, pick up a copy of the magazine from your nearest newspaper stand or bookstore. Or click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Credits
WORDS: MANASVI POTE;
PHOTOGRAPHS: PULKIT MISHRA;
CREATIVE DIRECTION & STYLING: VIJENDRA BHARDWAJ;
HAIR & MAKE-UP: DEEPA VERMA;
AGENCY: THE ARIST PROJECT;
FASHION EDITOR: KOMAL SHETTY
PHOTOGRAPHER’S AGENCY: ANIMA CREATIVES
BOOKINGS EDITOR: VARUN SHAH
PRODUCTION HOUSE: P PRODUCTIONS
HOSPITALITY: SWEENEY BOMBAY