Ahaan: The Golden Boy

It’s an unusually hot January afternoon. A small production unit is gathered around a vanity van parked at Stage Number 4 of Mumbai’s famed Mehboob Studio. Ahaan Panday is inside, getting in a quick workout before the photoshoot. Later, he struts out styled in a caramel tank top and pleated trousers by Hermès. Somewhere in the distance, I hear a crew member eloquently articulate what everyone is thinking. ‘Ekdum kadak, boss!’

In Panday, who made a historic entrance into the movies last year as a tortured rockstar in Saiyaara, Bollywood has at long last given us a breakout Gen Z actor we can all root for. He stands tall, seducing the camera with the confidence of someone stepping into his movie-star era. 

But even movie stars, it turns out, can be undone by a sleeveless tank top. For his next film, the 28-year-old is in the process of transforming into an action hero. His hair is shorter, physique more defined—and his management team is keen to not spoil the reveal for his fans. His abs, we’re told, are strictly off-limits for the shoot. But after some last-minute negotiating with the director of his next film, Ali Abbas Zafar, Panday’s freshly sculpted biceps are granted a soft launch.

It’s hard to tell how much of this background noise has reached Panday. He quietly takes his mark, plugs in his playlist of electronic tracks—“Go Back Now” by Jerro and “Midnight City” by M83—and packs in a final set of bicep curls.

***

Four hours have gone by. The area around Stage 4 is now dark and deserted. The only source of light is the one streaming out of the window of Panday’s trailer. The crew has packed up for the day and so have Panday’s biceps, which are now ensconced in a blue oversized hoodie. For the first time I see his shoulders slightly hunched as he sits crossed-legged on the sofa inside his van. 

“There’s a certain physical requirement for my next film and I’m half-way there,” he explains. “Right now, there’s about seven hours of daily physical activity. It’s three hours of action, followed by two-and-a-half hours of strength training in the gym, which is way more than people usually do. When you’re lifting, it makes you stiffer, so I need 30 minutes just to focus on mobility, feel a bit flexible. And then lately I’ve started this ice bath thing because your body is hurting so much. It kind of rejuvenates you.”

“I promise you, it’s a lot of fun,” he grins.

Fun is also the word that comes to mind as I piece together Panday’s internet footprint, especially his teen years. Like when he walked the ramp for close family friend and fashion designer Nandita Mahtani in 2016 in a white suit, minus the shirt. He was 18 and there was much less riding on his abs. His mother Deanne Panday, a former model and now an accomplished wellness and fitness expert, says this was the first time she realised “her cute kid” knew how to work an audience. “I thought, wow, he’s got confidence and a real aura. Even people who didn’t know who he was were cheering for him. Ahaan came backstage and said, ‘Can I please go back out again?’”

When I bring this up to Panday now, he covers his face sheepishly. “I did say that,” he admits.

“I remember that moment as clear as day. I wasn’t nervous but you know that feeling when your heart rate elevates because something so new is happening to you? I remember looking at the models to my left and right and asking, ‘So what do I do now?’ I had no idea. And I don’t know why, but I went out there and unbuttoned my jacket. I still don’t understand why I did that!” he laughs. 

That magnetism, his ability to charm a crowd, showed up early. At 16, he had amassed sizable popularity on a now-defunct social networking platform called Askfm where followers could ask him personal questions. Panday once casually invited them to an offline meet-and-greet. His mother was shocked to learn later that “some hundreds of kids” showed up to meet her son. I ask him how many of them were girls. He sidesteps the question with practiced tact. “Sometimes I wonder what all of them must be thinking of me now. I hope I’ve made them proud,” he tells me.  

My guess is that they turned up at the theatres on the opening weekend of filmmaker Mohit Suri’s Saiyaara in July 2025. That might partly explain the unprecedented and almost surreal mania around a film led by two debutantes (Panday and actress Aneet Padda), released at a time when the Bollywood box office was at its lowest ebb. Moreover, it was generally believed in film trade circles that the audience no longer had an appetite for love stories, only larger-than-life spectacles and spy franchises.

That theory collapsed within days of the film’s release. Videos began pouring in from theatres across the country: audiences weeping openly, teenagers and grown adults alike bawling their eyes out, throwing popcorn at the screen. One clip that travelled widely on social media was of a man in Mumbai watching the film while hooked up to an IV drip.

Panday still sounds faintly astonished by it all. “You know what, that was actually a person who had dialysis,” he says of the viral video. “Mohit sir found out later because we were curious about how all of this was happening.”

He pauses, then attempts to make sense of the frenzy. “I feel people reacted to it this way because for so many years we had such a set way of thinking about how things had to be done. It became so rigid. Maybe people just wanted something with artists not trying to be perfect, and this film allowed that.

“Romance is not perfect. Love is never perfect,” he adds. 

***

Krish Kapoor, Panday’s character in the film, is a mess. A budding musician who is talented, troubled and angry. In his opening scene, he punches the editor of a newspaper over an unfair review that favours nepo-kids over strugglers like him—an inadvertent irony given that Panday is the nephew of actor Chunky Panday and cousin of Ananya Panday. (His parents, though, aren’t from the movies).

Krish turns out to be the perfect green-flag boyfriend when the girl he’s in love with is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. To play a hero who is rough around the edges but a softie at heart, Suri instructed Panday to take inspiration from Sanjay Dutt. “Sanjay Dutt was the OG bad boy who I believed had a great heart and an endearing quality. I made Ahaan watch a lot of his earlier films and he did. In fact, there were times on set he was completely Sanju Baba,” Suri tells me.

“Would you like to know what music I listened to at that time?” offers Panday, with a twinkle in his eye. He turns into a child-like frontbencher, enthusiastically showing off his homework. He leans back to grab his phone and pops open his neatly organised playlists.

“I can’t do without music. Whether I’m entering a set, or leaving it, or at home, I always need it,” he says. This checks out. He arrived at the shoot with music wafting from the phone lodged in the back pocket of his jeans.

To access Krish’s “angst-ridden zone” he repeatedly listened to “Let Down” by Radiohead, “I Really Want to Stay At Your House” from a show called CyberPunk:Edgerunners, Mithoon’s “Maula Mere Maula” from Anwar and the title track of the Tamil film Mudhal Nee Mudivan Nee, amongst others. There are meticulously designed playlists to match the various moods of his character. He reads them out loud while scrolling. “There’s one that I named “The Need For Fame”. This one has “Dream On” by Aerosmith, “Radio Gaga” by Queen, “No Church In The Wild” by Jay-Z and Kanye which is a very ego-driven song. And there’s also “Unchained Melody” by Elvis Presley…” 

“I also have a huge collection of records. I prefer them for the quality. The mids are so much better. It’s crisper. Nothing on a phone can replicate that.”

Acting in Hindi films may be the profession Panday has chosen for himself. His larger calling, he says, is to be a consummate artist— someone with a hold over every form of creative expression. He’s not kidding when he says he’s tried his hand at “all kinds of things”.

“I’ve done all the acting workshops in Andheri. I’ve been a part of a theatre group. I’ve done all sorts of different things. But nothing has taught me more than life has taught me,” he says.

In third grade, Panday wrote a book about a boy who gets bullied in school for being too short. Aside from the poor spelling, he believes it could have been published. At 13, he dabbled in music production with a friend. “It was electronic music. It’s called Bass Trap and I think it's still available on SoundCloud,” he says. He enrolled himself into classes for 3D modelling and video game design. He prefers reading books to watching things because it “tremendously helps his craft”. Singing, he concedes, is “not his forte”.

“I was so obsessed with the idea of excellence that I felt I had to keep doing this and that. It was just do, do, do,” says Panday.

He was also making a point to his parents, buying time before they “shipped him off” to study abroad—a move that, in the end, never happened. “They were hoping that once I leave, I’ll find a job, start earning, and forget this dream of being in the film industry. They had seen the highs and lows my uncle had gone through. They were freaked out,” he says.

One of his more ambitious endeavours was creating a platform that invited upcoming film aspirants like him to pitch their short films. “I remember for one short we had Babil Khan [the late Irrfan’s son] who was behind the camera. He hadn’t yet decided to become an actor back then,” says Panday. The two films that were released got enough traction to raise funding for others. “We got the budget to shoot the next film in a proper studio with junior artists and a secondary cast,” he says.

He takes a pause to stifle his laughter. “But our director lost the footage. So yes, that was our downfall.”

***

If Panday had his way, I feel he could speak endlessly about his countless adventures. There’s an unmistakable joy and self-deprecation with which he chronologically lists his exploits. There’s no mention of a ‘struggle period’, a phrase actors love to use when they achieve fame after a long spell of waiting in the wings. Perhaps he’s taken notes from the social media drubbing his cousin and other kids with privilege and connections to film families get when they talk about their troubles.

And yet, proximity to the industry did not fast-track his debut. It took nearly nine years to materialise. A pandemic that came out of nowhere; a movie that almost happened but didn’t. A handful of high-profile male debuts in Hindi cinema came and went. For a while, Panday simply slipped from view.

What he did was wait…and work. He perfected playing the guitar during the lockdown, a skill that unexpectedly paid off when he was being considered for Saiyaara. Even his short-lived attempt at production didn’t go in vain. Yash Raj Films’ casting director Shanoo Sharma first took notice of him from one of those short films he made. “I believe she said, ‘Who is this boy with an Ellen DeGeneres haircut’,” says Panday, laughing.

If there’s one thing aspiring actors could learn from him, Suri tells me, is that when the going gets tough, “just keep working on your skills. Some day, they will all add up”.

In an industry that rewards constant visibility, Panday’s ability to stay under the radar has worked to his advantage. Even before the film’s release, his exposure to the media had been deliberately limited. It started off as a marketing strategy by Yash Raj Films, the studio that produced Saiyaara and exclusively manages both Panday and Padda. They skipped the standard promotional drill before the film’s release. No mall visits, performing at colleges, dance reels and podcast appearances. This was an audacious call that could have gone either way. Film promotions are aggressively in-your-face, and for younger actors who haven’t yet drummed up box-office clout, it stops just short of door-to-door selling. In Saiyaara’s case, less truly turned out to be more.

What’s more surprising is that the restraint didn’t end with the film’s success. After Saiyaara became a hit, a moment that would typically trigger overexposure, Panday continues to maintain a low-key public and digital presence. There are no traces of his gym visits or airport looks floating on Instagram. If he is able to bring back some intrigue, mystery and magic to movie stardom as we once knew it, this would be a worthy experiment.

For someone who once laid his life bare on social media, he has comfortably grown into this low-key existence. His own social media consumption has all but dwindled. “Until a week ago, it was nothing at all. Zero,” he reveals. He rummages through his phone to see if can find accurate data on this. “I’m not sure how to check…. But this week, maybe I logged in for five minutes in the day and at night. If I see a few fan pages, I reply to them in that time frame.” He would rather write them letters or send postcards.

***

The gatekeeping hasn’t gone down well with a section of fans. Redditors have been diligently piecing together clues on everything —from his latest haircut to rumours of him dating Padda. To service them, we do a latest refresh on Ahaan Panday trivia. He’s currently busy watching films his director has given him as research for his next character. He likes to hang with his school friends after work. “I have nine, and maybe three of them have seen Saiyaara,” he says. He recently started reading Butter by the Japanese author Asako Yukuz. In fact, he’s fascinated by the Japanese way of life and their artists. “They’ve retained their love for the physical world around them. It’s unadulterated by social media and what they see on their phones. You can see it in their literature… [Haruki] Murakami is a favourite. He just makes you fall in love with the mundane.” 

There’s another update. He isn’t sure if he’s allowed to speak about it. “I don’t know if I should say this,” he asks his manager, who is also present in the room.

“I actually got a whole surgery done after the release of Saiyaara last year,” he reveals. “And it’s one of the most painful surgeries you can do, with the longest recovery time.”

A few years ago, Panday had an incident on a snowmobile that left him with a shoulder subluxation. The injury made it difficult for him to hit his goals in the gym, so he decided to fix it before the action film. The doctor warned him that after the procedure his body would “go back to zero”, making it “nearly impossible” to achieve the desired physique for his next film. Panday looks pleased that he can now share this secret. He wants it to be known that he was able to “prove everyone wrong”.  

“I used to feel motivated by actors who had dramatic gym transformations,” he says. “But that was usually from a certain unhealthy body type to a healthy one. This was different; I went from being injured, to not being able to move, to not being able to lift, to being able to lift,” he says. The other miracle is that he spent months bound in a cast, and it went totally unnoticed. “I don’t know how nobody realised!” he says, with amusement.

The upside of having dedicated fan armies is that they’re always watching. A few of them sensed that something was not right and turned to his mother’s social media pages. “Since I’m not online too much they started asking her because she’s into fitness and all. They were like, why is he losing so much weight,” he says, smiling.

There’s been nothing but an outpouring of love for Panday. The box office adores him, his fans are watching out for him, and even hard-nosed movie critics have approved of him. He cannot wait to be back on a movie set almost after a year and show the world what else he’s got. “I do want to be seen as a great actor someday. That is a strong desire of mine.”

“I want to strive for excellence,” he reiterates.

That sentiment extends to this interview as well.

He’s tentative about how he’s fared. “I’m not sure how this went… I don’t think I’m this written interview type of guy,” he wonders, as I leave his trailer. Given the long list of skills he has taught himself, he will master this art too. After all, being observed was the role he was always meant to play. 

Credits

Chairperson: Avarna Jain

CEO: Debashish Ghosh

Editor: Rahul Gangwani

Creative Direction and Styling: Vijendra Bhardwaj

Assistant Stylist: Komal Shetty

Photography: Tarun Vishwa

Editorial Mentor: Saira Menezes

Managing Editor: Sonal Nerurkar

Hair: Raghu from Team Hakim Alim

Makeup: Stephan Jadhav

Deputy Editor: Mayukh Majumdar

Bookings Editor: Varun Shah

Production: P Productions

Artist Reputation Management: YRF

Esquire India Editorial: Saurav Bhanot, Prannay Pathak, Nitin Sreedhar, Abhya Adlakha, Rudra Mulmule, Riti Ghai, Kashish Mishra