Anil Kapoor is psyched to be here for the cover shoot.
His face is thin. But his smile is full. His make-up man Deepak is waiting, brush in hand, feet in exquisite cowboy boots and shapely back in a lovely tan shirt the texture of which I cannot quite determine. Is it chenille or suede?
Anyway, Deepak is waiting for Kapoor, his posture stoic in its patience. After 44 years of making up an ageless star, Deepak deserves to hear from close quarters a most fitting answer to whether Anil Kapoor is thinking about turning 70 this December.
“I’m rather looking forward to it,” Kapoor says in his decisive-dad way.
When he hit 60, it had been a few weeks since the finale of 24: India aired. Earlier that year, daughter Sonam had starred in the career-defining biopic Neerja. Son, Harsh Varrdhan, had just made his film debut with Mirzya.
“We celebrated my 60th in London. Where do I celebrate my 70th birthday? That’s what I’m thinking about.”
Looking at Kapoor, I admonish myself: Why do we fuss over age that much? But I still ask that question.
“I’m excited to get into the phase of life that exists between 70 and 80.”
Anil Kapoor and “80”. Hell naah, they don’t belong together. They’re like the repelling ends of two magnets. You so much as think about them and they kick each other away without physical contact. For the past decade or so, he’s been constantly hailed, sometimes with affectionate disbelief, as a paragon of youth. Youth, not the collective noun that rather clumsily describes a general group of people and capable of good change and bad—but that fast passage of life that eludes you with each tick of the clock.
And now, blud goes around like a twentysomething. No, those are not my words. That stray hook is from an X post that he’s now showing me on his phone. He suggests to his hairstylist, Jaipal, standing by the doorway, and Deepak, that they should use stuff like this to market themselves.
“Use this, you guys. Your business will grow. Kill it.”
“These last 10 years have been fantastic,” he declares.
“And I didn’t even take part in the nostalgia kind of work. I’ve not done any twos and threes and sequels and all. All the other stars—actors and filmmakers—are doing it. Banking on past glory. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I just constantly try to do things in a progression. The nostalgia movies are like a fixed deposit. And the interest is increasing. I can take it out anytime and use it.”
Kapoor is going through his phone, looking intently for his sent and saved folders to share an Instagram post that sums up his philosophy of life. It’s what’s kept him young for five decades.
He takes a couple of minutes to look for it, but as often happens with these things, you just can’t find them.
“The plan is to feel good. How, how, what do I do to make myself feel good? Which helps me to maintain my relationships emotionally, financially, physically?”
His search has always been for the feel-good factor. “Like, I’ve come here for this photo shoot. I’m here, talking to you. And to speak to you with the same energy and positivity, I’ll have to take active steps.” He’s checked how much he’s slept (eight-and-a-half hours) and been for a workout. “Otherwise, I’ll sound very been-there-done-that. But I want to do another interview. I’ve been doing interviews for 50 years.”
Kapoor, who has been in the movies for 46 years now, starring in films that can be truly held as iconic—Mr India (1987), Parinda (1989), Mashaal (1984), Meri Jung (1985), Pukar (2008), Nayak: The Real Hero (2001), Slumdog Millionaire (2008)—continues to enjoy the rituals of a magazine cover.
“I still remember my first cover. The photographer was Gautam Rajadhyaksha. I’ve been so excited. Somebody’s going to ask me questions.”
Earlier, I walked in expecting a sleek silver fade on his head. The kind of thing that’s made Kapoor a daddy for all generations today (and he knows it: “They’re all like, he’s our guy.”). But as he turned to face me on the barstool, a lush pompadour revealed itself. Dense hair peeking from behind the ears. And with that, when he smiles his mischief-mode smile, it’s a flash cut from Meri Jung.
“I’ve grown it out for Dragon, the Prashanth Neel film. I constantly get the feeling that I should like myself. I start getting bored doing the same thing—the same kind of role. A change like this keeps me feeling fresh.”
Kapoor is known to not lean on hair prosthetics as far as possible. It’s this self-sufficiency that’s carrying him into his seventies with trademark, unperturbed flamboyance.
“It’s been a tough journey and I’ve been fortunate to play around with my hair; I don’t have to wear wigs.”
He never stops appreciating what he has. “Eyes. Hair. Body. Smell. Everything. I take no relationship for granted.”
But it’s the moustache. That glorious upper-lip hair has never been allowed to get old.
“Today, every actor—every face—has facial hair. Beard, stubble, the works. And I remember someone once told me moustache actors don’t become huge stars. And I would give the example of Raj Kapoor, Clark Gable, even Charlie Chaplin. I think I was among the first in India to have made facial hair that way.”
But the moustache-only look is… decisive in a destructive sort of way, isn’t it? It’s tough to just have a moustache.
“Yeah, for an actor, it’s better to have a clean canvas. Then you can play around. Having a moustache is a bummer to a certain extent.”
He recalls the overlap that happened while he was working on Animal (2023) and Fighter (2024). “Animal got a bit delayed and I had already given the dates to Fighter. So, the makers of the former wanted to finish my work. And I said to Mr [Sandeep Reddy] Vanga and his brother, ‘What can I do? It takes time for me to get that moustache’.”
The makers of the film waited for Kapoor to complete his Fighter schedule. “The director was kind enough—he understood my point of view. It was important. It’s important for me to treat every role as the best role of my life.”
This whole obsessive moustache exchange is an opportunity to understand the never-monotonous consistency of Kapoor’s career, I proffer to myself. From its wide-set adaptation to the familial-conflict saga Virasat (1997) and the cavalier handlebar of Ram Lakhan (1989) to the salt-and-peppered rendition of Dil Dhadakne Do (2015) and the denser, meaner affair he sported in Animal (2023), his stardom is the story of making classic work even as novelty keeps pecking at the world’s collar. Sprawled on the bed in an American Psycho-inflected trench-and-tie look later today, Kapoor will remind the photographer that “convention can be chic if done with conviction”: “Don’t make it different for the sake of different!”
In the following look, Kapoor will walk out of his suite in a crisp leather jacket over a classic white shirt and necktie, something Race’s Robert D’Costa would have rocked with ease. Incidentally, in his final look for the day—a beautiful beige suit by Our Legacy—Kapoor reminds me of Arun Verma from Mr India. No AI would have got the what-if-these-films-were-made-today version of Anil Kapoor so right.
Mr India bookended a definitive decade of Kapoor playing earnest men standing up to bullies. In the Dilip Kumar-directed Mashaal, he was a journalist reformed from the very structures that he is shown to resist in the film.
In Meri Jung, out came the lawyer’s whites to fight systemic wrongs in preparation for a larger personal vengeance. Plots like these readily showcased Kapoor’s potential for stories about the wages of social injustice. In these films, including what he did in Nayak (2001), the stirred agency of the journalist, the lawyer, the citizen, also defined Kapoor’s public image.
“It started with Woh Saat Din and Saaheb (1985). And then with films like Mr. India and Eeshwar, these characters were all about selflessness and innocence. For me, it was a Chaplinesque influence—the great Charlie Chaplin and, of course, Raj Kapoor saheb,” he recalls, alluding to the generosity of spirit of his characters in his first decade, and crediting directors K Bhagyaraj, Shekhar Kapur, Babu and K Vishwanath for bringing him these characters.
Today, you see all of Kapoor’s fingers clutching a quiver full of conflicted, middle-aged alpha men. In Dil Dhadakne Do, he plays an egocentric, cavalier patriarch. In Animal, his character’s entitled toxicity is what ultimately gets to his destructive son. Jugjugg Jeeyo sees him take on a thoroughly self-obsessed, adulterous man. Throw the likes of Alpha, Fighter, War 2 and Subedaar in, and you have a testosterone cocktail spiked with a dash of deviousness.
Where has a man who has been married for over four decades and built a life so closely intertwined with his family mined all this? Besides, of course, what’s on the page and the director’s brief, as he tells me.
“I’ve seen them in real life. There’s so much of myself, too, to a certain extent. That kind of a streak exists within me, but I have to… to…”
Curb it?
“Yes, curb it. I don’t behave like that in real life because I know I’m sensible. I’m educated. That’s not how things are done. But when I’m in front of the camera, I let the streak come to the surface.”
But before all of that happened, Vidhu Vinod Chopra brought him 1942: A Love Story, which saw a re-release on August 21. And he refused the part.
“How could I be so soft, so tender? I am not at all like that in life.”
I think about Kapoor, the swashbuckling icon of masculinity and Kapoor, the loving friend struggling to contain his tears at a memorial for the late Satish Kaushik, who he shared screen space with and worked under the direction of in several films.
“I am not at all romantic, man. Some people have that kind of persona—you have Aamir, Rishi saab, Shah Rukh… But then I did it. As a challenge… the character… Narendra.
“I was doing romantic scenes, but they were not the main plot. Rakhwala, Eeshwar (both 1989), Beta (1992)… they all had them but the story was the draw. With 1942, it’s a complete love story. My character is so much in love that it becomes a coming-of-age for him. Everybody around him is trying to be revolutionary—the biggest emotion is the patriotic emotion. But he is so much in love that he can’t see it at first… But he isn’t born like this revolutionary. Everybody comes of age.”
***
When he was working on his first-ever film, the Telugu drama Vamsa Vruksham (1980), it was hard for Kapoor to imagine he would ever get this far. Between that Telugu film and Dragon, his story is a lesson in never slowing down.
“I never imagined I’d be in this position. Who could? I started with bit roles—I just wanted a job. And then, things started moving, nationally, internationally…”
If you remember what he said about progression, it is this. Kapoor the actor moves on quickly, and without anyone realising. And it has all been for “education”, like Slumdog Millionaire, a film his son Harsh urged him to take on and one that opened an international chapter.
But when Kapoor started out, the motivation was more basic: he needed to work. He and his brother, producer Boney Kapoor, were determined to help put the family on a firmer financial footing. Their father, the late Surinder Kapoor, was a producer, but a string of financial losses left the family in a position of uncertainty.
There’s a belief that Anil Kapoor has never really had to make a comeback. That you’ve never had an extended lean run.
I’m sure there were periods when you felt what you were doing wasn’t working out. Or when you weren’t sure what to do.
“So many times. It happens every day. Every year. Every decade. Confusions, dilemmas, feeling insecure, feeling down.
“I often wonder, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’ I never know if what I’m doing is gonna work out. I feel low at night, but I bounce back in the morning.”
Kapoor recently watched Novak Djokovic: The Wolf in Winter, the documentary on the Serbian tennis colossus. He brings it up.
“The more you make fun of me, put me down—the more I’ll use that energy to become bigger and better. It doesn’t put me down. So I wait for people to say wrong things about me.”
You use it as fuel.
“I use it as fuel. Matter of fact, I really identify with and feel him. I see myself in him—not that I am comparing myself to him. His achievements are huge. But so many times you see someone and go, ‘Oh yeah, this is it’.”
Virat Kohli and Tom Cruise, too. Kapoor has high praise for the Hollywood icon, who was his co-star in Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (2011). “Look at the way he’s taken care of himself and his body. So many times, people say about an actor, ‘Oh he’s put on weight and not taken care of his body but it’s okay if he’s acting well’. Why?” Kapoor asks in the exhortative pitch that he has made his own. He’s known to never smoke or drink and insists on a sound sleep.
“Mick Jagger. He’s 83 years old.”
Still performing!
“Still looking that way!”
Kapoor has always ensured enough space in front and back. And that has allowed him the luxury of choice.
I want to ask him, though, when it was during his career that he felt the most vulnerable. And it’s not like he wouldn’t answer it—Kapoor doesn’t cower at all.
He gets a call. Imploring him to watch a teaser. Would he please just watch it? Kapoor assuages the caller. He will watch it right away. He proceeds to watch it intently. He then whips out the dialler and calls him back. The caller picks up. Kapoor loads it and fires it into the receiver: “Zabardast. Zabardast. Zabardast. Zabardast. Zabardast.”
It’s crazy how much the man can do with one word. He doesn’t have to say anything else.
“So, yeah. Where were we? I said thank God I’ve been in a position where I can make my choices. It’s very tough to be able to make your own choices, to be able to tell yourself, nahin karna hai, nahin karna hai, it’s not ticking all boxes.”
What about a film like AK vs AK?
“That was also a choice I made.”
But what got you sold on it?
“The idea! It was so meta. It was something I’ve never done. It was something the Indian audience had rarely seen,” Kapoor says of the divisive self-aware mockumentary directed by Vikramaditya Motwane skewering star culture in Bollywood.
“Vikram had narrated me films earlier also, but this one struck a chord and I felt I must do it. And I went all out and did it,” adds Kapoor, who, playing an exaggerated version of himself in the film, dances poignantly to the beat-heavy dance number “My Name is Lakhan” from Ram Lakhan (1989), a song that still gets played as background music to Kapoor’s public appearances.
Mind you, this is a man very much intentional with his charisma. Throughout Esquire India’s cover shoot, Kapoor stays in control of his hair and outfits, gesturing at the camera to be brought closer to his face, loosening everybody on set up with his witty rejoinders and familiar swagger. At the bar, posing against the window with his fist firmly against the glass, he will break the fourth wall, grin theatrically at me and do an I-see-you from metres away.
But why did it matter so much for you to star in a product that unmakes the necessary myth of stardom?
“The thing is, when you do these films, you should be very clear who you’re catering to. For AK vs AK, for instance, there is a set of filmmakers who loved it.”
And some didn’t.
“They want to see me only as the quintessential hero who beats up f**king so many people and all that. Like, [Sandeep Reddy] Vanga was upset when he saw AK vs AK. ‘No, sir, I can’t see you like this’. When I do a film where my role is reactive instead of active, filmmakers like that go, ‘Why? We want you to be active. Aggressively active,” Kapoor explains, employing active and reactive to mean the protagonist who drives the action versus the one that absorbs it.
“But then I might have missed out on some great films if I was always looking at such roles. Some fantastic films that I’ve been in, like 1942,” he says.
It’s a tension Kapoor has been negotiating for much of his career. Becoming a star means acquiring an image and then trying to escape it. Alongside the films that were defining him, such as Mashaal, Meri Jung and Mr India, Kapoor stepped into the ‘angst’ space created by Amitabh Bachchan and Shatrughan Sinha, in films like Tezaab, Rakhwala, Ram Lakhan, and even Benaam Badsha, to a certain extent.
“You don’t expect a person who’s got such a macho image to do anything but act cruelly towards a girl and all. Not climb on a balcony and be all romantic or get sold off by his wife, which is what happens in Judaai, fronted by Sridevi and Urmila. How dare anybody sell you, Anil Kapoor? You’re not the character—you’re Anil Kapoor.”
What Kapoor is referring to also speaks to the duality his new-age fans are happily confounded by. Which is that while Hollywood and Western stories have seen him as a strong performer with a malleable magnetism, those that have followed Kapoor into the 2000s and 2010s are entertained no end by his capacity for meaningless mischief. In films like No Entry (2005), Welcome (2007) and Pagalpanti (2019), Kapoor has essayed lovable scoundrels.
“Sometimes, there are roles that you just have to go and have fun with. The director’s there to protect you, it’s written really well and you’re just supposed to enjoy to the fullest.”
But, then, with comedy, too, he has his own reservations.
“With some people, I have to see their past work, how they handle comedy. Can’t do it blindly. People like Anees [Bazmee] and Priyan [Priyadarshan] really know the genre,” he answers, in what is his most solemn response today.
The long and short of it is, Kapoor is more meticulous and thorough with his process than he lets on. He knows his cinema, knows what it has made of him, and seems remarkably clear-eyed about the place he occupies in it. That confidence has served him off-screen too.
Take, for instance, the thing with Akele Hum Akele Tum (1995). Kapoor reminds me of what director Mansoor Khan said of his reaction to being dropped from the film after Aamir Khan, Mansoor’s cousin, expressed his strong interest in the lead role.
“I called Anil. He was a sport. He was very decent about being dropped,” said Khan in an interview, I see on Kapoor’s phone screen.
“I think the secret of my longevity is that I have catered to every generation. I connect with kids today. Arre yaar yeh toh apna aadmi hai. So, I want to keep doing that—and maybe dip into my fixed deposit that I spoke about earlier.”
The following day, as I recover from the effects of a red-eye flight taken by a 33-year-old human body in 2026, I receive it. A text from Anil Kapoor. He’s found it—the Instagram post that sums up what keeps him young.
It says, “If you look younger than your age, this is what it means: …people who appear younger often carry something deeper—a resilience of heart and a lightness of being that time cannot take away. If people tell you that you do not look your age, […] it may be a reflection of the peace you protect, the burdens you refuse to carry, and the hope you never let die.”
You know how these things work. They’re never fact-based in the provable sense, but Kapoor definitely has practised something to the same effect all his life. He’s fought the fight, all while smiling that hundred-watt-smile.
And then, maybe, it’s the fact that he can still get psyched about a cover shoot.
Chairperson: Avarna Jain
CEO: Debashish Ghosh
Editor: Rahul Gangwani
Photography: Tarun Vishwa
Styling: Saloni Parekh
Story: Prannay Pathak
Make-up: Deepak Chauhan
Hair: Jaipal Raskar from Whynot? By Zeeba
Artist Reputation Management: Raindrop Media
Location And Hospitality Partner: Roswyn, A Morgans Originals Hotel
Bookings Editor: Varun Shah
Production Assistant: Danielle Pereira
Editorial Mentor: Saira Menezes
Managing Editor: Sonal Nerurkar
Deputy Editor: Mayukh Majumdar
Digital Editor: Saurav Bhanot
Features Editor: Nitin Sreedhar
Junior Fashion Editor: Komal Shetty
Head of Copy Desk: Prannay Pathak
Senior Features Writer: Jeena J Billimoria
Digital Writers: Arshita Suri, Aditi Tarafdar, Rudra Mulmule
Senior Social Media Executive: Riti Ghai
Social Media Executive: Kashish Mishra
To read more stories from Esquire India's September 2026 issue, pick up a copy of the magazine from your nearest newspaper stand or bookstore. Or click here to subscribe to the magazine.