The Devilish Deliciousness of Akshaye Khanna

There’s a satisfying duality to Akshaye Khanna breaking the internet with his dance to the song FA9LA by Flipperachi in Dhurandhar. The Bahraini track plays in the backdrop of his character, ganglord Rehman Dakait, enjoying a generous welcome at a Baloch militia camp. The duality is that while the whole sequence, as seen on the torrent of reels online, is ultimately not as fun or hair-raising (on the contrary, annoying)—it has the unintended effect of hiding every other moment in the film where this character is enjoyable.

For instance, in the film’s closing moments, on the run from the police, the Baloch mob boss launches a surprising offensive on his assailants. He grabs hold of the much larger SP Chaudhary Aslam (Sanjay Dutt) and starts raining blows on him. And when his newly turned Man Friday Hamza (Ranveer Singh) joins the fight, Dakait turns around and gives him a pummelling, too. For a minute, you might worry that the scrawny savage will screw the script over, rip apart both of these men and bury them six feet under. But then Dutt delivers a typically comical comeback, interrupting Khanna’s last words by gunning him in the throat with an AK-47.

What makes this brief shift in momentum believable is the man of the moment himself: Akshaye Khanna. He doesn’t really need to murder a rival gangster in the middle of the street by clobbering him with a metal weight. His cold stare and stop-start gait can send chills down your spine.

It’s hardly the first time Khanna has essayed a ruthless antagonist. It was grey characters that brought his career its second wind. From a manipulative con artist in Humraaz (2002) and a wastrel planning to kill his brother in Race to a conniving police officer in Drishyam 2 (2022) and Chhava (2025), where he played Aurangzeb—Khanna’s irresistible mystique has attracted legions of acolytes.

It’s happened partly thanks to a collective realisation that Khanna is a gifted performer who never received the flowers due to him. The son of ’70s heartthrob Vinod Khanna, his striking similarity with his dad collided memorably with a unique brand of screen naïveté seen in films such as Border (1997), Taal and Aa Ab Laut Chalein (both 1999) at the start of his career. Even in Dhurandhar, his characterisation taps into an insistence on his original innocence. So much so that it makes the gratuitous violence of the Babu Dakait murder seem moral and needed. His onscreen excesses almost account for the off-screen slights meted out to him.

And that’s what makes Khanna playing a baddie so freaking delicious. He’s the charmer who is blissfully oblivious to the fact—that assumption coming from his famous reclusiveness and public introversion. Unlike another male star who might luxuriate openly in the attention they might get, Khanna seems to project a virginal neutrality to the buzz around him.

When an actor like that turns around to reveal a darker, more sinister facet to their public perception, it usually has the kind of effect that Khanna’s had. The first time one saw that happen with Khanna was arguably in Dil Chahta Hai (2001). In the turning point of the movie, his character—a sensitive, introverted young artist who has fallen in love with a much older woman—slaps Aamir Khan’s character in a heated argument over crossed lines. One might say he came of age as a performer in that moment, receding hairline and all.

In his introduction scene in Dhurandhar, his grieving silence is an unmistakable co-passenger of death. “Is that the blood of my child?” his first words come after a long pause—a whisper that echoes in an abandoned hospital corridor. At a political rally, the little moment he takes to scan the assembled crowd before greeting them spiritedly, or the little, tired ‘woah’ he lets out after killing Babu Dakait.

For the longest time, Akshaye Khanna and his pursed brows and hardworking cleft chin have carried the load of his performances. But it is in these subtle, carefully measured details that he makes you truly shiver in awe.