Arjun Rampal is Alive and Killing It

“No”.

I’m on the phone with Arjun Rampal, who’s in his hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia. It’s barely days after news breaks that he and partner Gabriella Demetriades formalised their eight-year-long partnership with a no-fuss court marriage in Goa. Forget a multiday, destination, big-fat Bollywood wedding; the couple rocked up to the sub-registrar’s office in North Goa wearing basic white tees and jeans. The only reason we know about their wedding is because a photo of them with the sub-registrar was leaked to the press.

I’ve known Rampal since I first interviewed him in 2001, just before the release of his debut film Pyaar Ishq Aur Mohabbat. He’s never been one to hide a relationship, but he also doesn’t believe in talking about them. Asking him about his wedding day is the only time during this interview that he shuts the question down followed by laugh. A masterclass in drawing boundaries with undeniable charm.

As we chat, Rampal laughs easily and often, but is also clearly in a contemplative mood. In Georgia to shoot alongside Mohanlal for National Award-winning director Vishnu Mohan’s Operation Ganga, he says he’s in a hurry, but the conversation flows longer than either of us intended.

The 53-year-old actor never thought of himself as someone who’d shatter norms; or even enjoy doing so, but that’s who he is today. “It’s exciting,” he says. Just this year itself, his releases have been the larger-than-life, spy thriller Dhurandhar: The Revenge and the slow-burn Satluj that chronicles the real-life of a human rights crusader. The films and their fate couldn’t have been more different if they tried.

A sequel to 2025’s monster hit, Dhurandhar had Rampal reprise his outing as Pakistani intelligence officer Major Iqbal. In a testosterone-filled, peak maximalist film with a body count that rivals small wars, he plays Iqbal with a quiet menace. Amongst the highest grossing Bollywood films of all time, these movies have provoked zeitgeist-y discourse around cinema and nationalism as well as inspiring a flood of memes and reels.

A few months later, director Honey Trehan’s Satluj (formerly Punjab 95) dropped on Zee5 after years of being entangled in a complex web of censorship and bruised political egos. Within this real-life story of Punjabi activist Jaswant Singh Khalra (played by Diljit Dosanjh), Rampal plays a principled CBI officer investigating Khalra’s disappearance. Dogged in his resolve to bring justice, his character anchors one of Bollywood’s sharpest political films in recent times. The film’s own journey to audiences, however, was short-lived: less than 48 hours after its release, it was taken down from Zee5 in India following government directions citing national security concerns. 

For Rampal, the rewards are not just professional but also generational. “It feels great to be a part of films that I am proud of and which are resonating with different kinds of audiences. My audience is growing; suddenly Gen Z is discovering me and that’s fun. In our line of work, only we can create our shelf-lives. You can keep going,” he says.

These choices reflect how Rampal has shaped a career that marks 25 years, moving between genres, formats and characters without being too concerned about where each might take him. Film by film, the six-foot-one actor has built a filmography that is at once category-defying and dynamic. He’s played a down-on-his-luck musician, a skilled assassin, a mercurial older brother in a political dynasty and a Robin Hood-esque ruthless gangster. He has balanced masala films like Housefull (2010) and Ra.One (2011) with Rituparno Ghosh’s National Award-winning film The Last Lear (2007) and Aparna Sen’s The Rapist (2021) which bagged the Kim Jiseok Award at the Busan International Film Festival.

This hasn’t been by accident, nor by grand design. “If an offer came my way that I wanted to do, I went ahead and did it. A lot of them backfired but a lot of them also worked,” he says. “Along the way, I realised there was so much room to evolve and understand my craft better. I learnt to spend time and invest in how I prepare and not take anything for granted. I’m still learning and because of that, I feel like there’s always room for improvement and growth, and there’s always room to surprise.”

In a landscape notorious for typecasting and the obsession with being No 1 on the call-sheet, Rampal is a rare breed. “I’ve always played different kinds of characters, never shying away from negative parts, small roles or main leads.”

It wasn’t always like this, though.

In the early aughts, all eyes in Bollywood were on Rampal, the first among his cohort of supermodels to make the switch to acting. Discovered by the late fashion designer Rohit Bal as a teen, he had already been a familiar face for almost a decade at this point. The Economics major had walked the runways in India and internationally, been named Society magazine’s Face of the Year in 1994 and smouldered in popular music videos, including Nusrat Fateh Ali’s “Kinna Sona Tenu.”

But then, he got bored.

I remember Rampal from those early days: his languid charm was turned up to a ten, but beneath it was the unmistakeable anxiety of a debutant. In the love triangle in Pyaar Ishq Aur Mohabbat, he played a struggling model-actor whom he described at the time as “a Casanova of sorts.” Directed by Rajiv Rai (Mohra, 1994; Gupt, 1997), the film sank without a trace.

Though, this was never meant to be his debut film.

Rampal’s first movie offer came in 1997, from the legendary cinematographer, Ashok Mehta. The two had worked together on a Monte Carlo sweater commercial and Mehta offered him the lead in his directorial debut Moksha: Salvation. Almost immediately after, Rampal signed photographer Shantanu Sheorey’s Jadh, an adaptation of Marathi author Anil Barve’s Thank you, Mr Glad. Both were ambitious films that got trapped in years of production purgatory. While Moksha released in theatres in 2001 and was described by critics as “Arjun’s 70mm portfolio,” Jadh never saw the light of day. Rampal had to wait a little longer for his first taste of box office success—Vipul A Shah’s heist thriller Aankhen (2002), which also starred Sushmita Sen, Akshay Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan.

This, of course, was all a long time ago. While I am still interviewing film stars, Rampal’s career and life has changed a fair amount.

To begin with, he doesn’t live in Mumbai anymore. The actor, Demetriades and their two sons—Arik, 7, and Ariv, 3—are living their best susegaad life. They traded their sea-facing digs in Bandra, Mumbai for the peace and quiet of a north-Goa village.

“We initially moved during the pandemic,” he recalls. “Arik was small and it was so sad to see him just locked up in an apartment.” A villa with a garden and a pool is exactly what the new family and their four dogs—golden retrievers Faf, Dean and Brando and indie rescue Simba—needed. “It was just getting too much in an apartment.”

This was meant to be a stop-gap arrangement. As the world went back to normal, though, the couple found that they didn’t want to give up their quiet country life.

“We finally felt like we were living rather than being stuck in an apartment. My dogs are also thriving here. There was a whole shift in energy for all of us,” he shares. For some time, they maintained both homes; until it got too much. “It’s not like we have nine-to-five jobs,” he says. Demetriades, a fashion entrepreneur behind the label Deme, has “a bit of a work-from-home situation. But for me, it’s very easy. Mumbai is a 45-minute flight away.”

Traditionally, entertainment businesses the world over have operated on an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ maxim. This brutal reality is driven by a constant oversupply of talent and short cultural attention span. It’s no different in Bollywood, but this is not a worry keeping the actor up at night. “Out of sight, out of mind happens when you’re trying to make it. It’s different when you’ve got a body of work that speaks for itself,” he explains. “People who know your work will also instinctively know when you are right for a part.”

This is who Rampal is today—someone who knows exactly what he loves and more importantly, what he brings to the table. He doesn’t quite remember exactly when his attitude towards his craft shifted but “it was about seven-eight films in”.

He recalls, “When I first faced the camera as a model, I remember being comfortable and working off instinct. That’s exactly what I did when I started acting. I didn’t really put a lot of thought into things. When the switch flipped in my head, I realised that acting is not just about the actor; it has to be a collaborative effort. Now I really enjoy delving deeper into my characters.”

There were collaborators like actor-director Farhan Akhtar and the late director Rituparno Ghosh, who helped him push the envelope. “These were like-minded people who worked with an idea and a process that made sense to me,” he says.

And, that is when Rampal fell in love with acting. “I finally realised this is why I’m here.”

After some early middling films, this ‘switch’ meant that Rampal didn’t want to be trapped in dull leading-man parts. He signed his first negative role in director Apoorva Lakhia’s Ek Ajnabee—A Man Apart (2005). Then came Om Shanti Om (OSO, 2007). As the ruthless film producer Mukesh ‘Mike’ Mehra in Farah Khan’s campy reincarnation drama, he cemented his position as Bollywood’s go-to for delivering danger with devastating charm. “Playing the bad guy in OSO and now Dhurandhar scared me. To begin with, these characters are very hard to relate to, and then the actual performance really takes a lot out of you.” He pirouetted from blockbuster villainy to play down-on-his-luck, idealistic musician Joe in Rock On!! (2008) without overplaying his hand. His fears about Rock On!! had more to do with the film’s unusual subject and treatment. Rampal’s restrained and nuanced performance as the broody, long-suffering guitarist marked a major turning point in his career, winning him awards for Best Supporting Actor at both the National Film Awards and Filmfare Awards. “Even in my wildest dreams, I couldn’t have imagined that I’d win a National Award for playing Joe,” he says. This change in perspective also forced him to re-evaluate what success truly means.

“Just because something wasn’t successful doesn’t mean that it’s bad.” In an industry obsessed with box-office collections, people would keel over if they heard this, but Rampal dead serious. As a producer, he’s backed two films—I See You (2006) and Daddy (2017)—under his Chasing Ganesh Films banner. The former was a romance with a splash of magical realism and the latter based on the life and times of real-life Mumbai gangster Arun Gawli. Apart from acting in both, he also wrote the screenplay for Daddy along with its director Ashim Ahluwalia. The two films, unfortunately, didn’t work at the box office. “Did I take a hit financially…yes, but I’m also very proud of the work we did,” he states. “I See You had a soundtrack that was fantastic while Daddy was a first for many fantastic crew members who have gone on to do greater things. For me, these are wins. After a failure, you go back to the drawing board but the most important thing is to keep the creativity in you alive, and then try again.”

As Rampal transformed his career, filmmakers began to take notice. In early-to-mid 2010, he made three films—Rajneeti (2010), Chakravyuh (2012) and Satyagraha (2013) with director Prakash Jha who is known for social, political and crime dramas that examine caste dynamics, corruption and governance. “When I was writing that Prithviraj 'Prithvi' Pratap character, his was the face that I kept imagining,” Jha recalls. “This was despite the fact that I didn't know him or his capacity as an actor, but I felt like he’d be right for it. He delivered exactly the kind of volatility and aggression that his character needed.” His ability to hold his own in an ensemble film featuring heavyweights like Ajay Devgn and Manoj Bajpayee was only part of his appeal. “He is very easy to work with and disciplined,” says Jha.

Decades later, this is exactly why his Satluj director is hoping to work with him again. “I’ve known Diljit for over a decade now, so in my head Arjun was the only star on our set but he never behaved like one,” says Trehan, who was struck by how little Rampal demanded in terms of the usual star comforts, including his vanity van arrangements. He was often on set even when he wasn’t required for a scene. 

“Once he was convinced of the film and his character, he completely surrendered to my vision which again doesn’t happen with stars,” says the director. That surrender is evident in one of Satluj’s most moving scenes, which went viral. Rampal’s character, Samudra Singh, reminds his seniors that the scale of state brutality against its own citizens in Punjab of the ’90s was perhaps the “biggest genocide our country has seen post-Independence”. “This is a vicious circle of violence which the powerful use for their own agenda and it will never stop. It will go on and on until we don’t step in and set an example,” his character adds.  

“I am still so surprised by his hunger as an artist,” Trehan recalls.

As much as his career is a testament to his persistence, Rampal consistently operates on the belief that growth happens outside your comfort zone. Earlier this year, he went on a ten-city North America tour as a DJ playing at some of the biggest nightclubs in each city. “For someone who has been a well-known face for over three decades to show up in public to do something completely new takes a lot of courage,” says Hussain ‘DJ Whosane’ Babai, one of the pioneers of EDM in India. Having been friends for “over-three- decades-or-so”, he not only helped Rampal set up his DJ console at home but also “taught him the ropes”. If you thought this was a low-effort cash grab, you couldn’t be more wrong. “He’s been passionate about music and DJing for as long as I can remember,” Hussain adds.

Apart from being a fan of house music, DJing also meant that Rampal could socialise without actually having to socialise. “I am quite an anti-social person. Being a DJ is the only way it’s acceptable to wear headphones at a party,” he says with a loud chuckle. After years of playing for friends and family, the actor first started spinning in public at his Delhi nightclub LAP about a decade ago. “I’d do a gig every once in a while after that but it was very obvious that people were coming to see me and not for the music.” 

Just about when Rampal was ready to give up, two things happened around the same time—he was invited to play at one of Hyderabad’s largest clubs and Hussain suggested some tweaks to his set. Rampal recalls, “I enjoy House, Disco and Techno, but he reminded me that I wasn’t playing for myself but for an audience, and they wanted Bollywood.” Though initially skeptical, he took the feedback on board. “I played a really tight set at Big Bull and that place erupted. People seemed to be really enjoying the music and I had fun too!” That night set the wheels in motion for what would become the North American Rampage Tour this summer.

Hussain describes Rampal’s sound as “happy and energetic”. “There’s a lot of dancing and singalongs. He doesn’t play Bollywood straight off the shelf; everything is remixed in a style that he enjoys playing,” he adds. Along with DJ Akhtar, the duo have plans in the music space that includes producing original music and establishing a studio. As a student and now collaborator, Rampal has impressed his friend. According to Hussain, “He’s gone from experimenting at home to connecting with the thousands who show up. He really does his homework before every gig. No matter how tired he is, I’ve seen him work through flights. He’s involved in everything from picking the visuals to the lighting.”

Apart from filming Operation Ganga, Rampal is currently also shooting Hansal Mehta and Robbie Grewal’s Amazon Prime series, Billionaire and Anil Sharma’s period drama, Arjun Naga. Ready for release is Abbas Mastan’s thriller 3 Monkeys, the late Sangeeth Sivan’s last film Blind Game and O Saathi Re, a Netflix series with Imtiaz Ali as the showrunner. Considering how crowded his date diary is, there’s no danger of Rampal quitting movies, but he’s having fun DJing. “I'm not an incredible DJ or anything, but DJ Akhtar and Hussain all tell me I have a very different style. It’s scary but I am really enjoying sharing the music I enjoy,” he says.

While his professional life continues at full tilt, his personal life has found a very different rhythm. For the first time in his adult life, Rampal is living a simpler, slower pace of life. Born in Jabalpur, he grew up in Deolali and Kodaikanal. He spent his salad days swinging on banyan trees and riding wild horses. The open spaces of Goa have brought back some of that childhood freedom. It helps that Demetriades shares his passion for the outdoors. “We like hiking, cycling, playing sports or even just going for a run; there’s also a great padel community. If nothing else, just going out for a drive is lovely because it's just so nice to be surrounded by greenery,” he says, adding, “My kids are finally getting to live like that, which is something they could have never experienced in Mumbai.”

The last time I interviewed Rampal was along with his daughters Mahikaa, then 17, and Myra, then 14, for a special Father’s Day issue in 2019. Until then, the actor and his former wife Mehr Jesia made a very conscious decision to keep their daughters away from the spotlight. That interview and photoshoot marked the then-teenage girls’ debut to public life, so it wasn’t surprising that the air in the studio that evening was thick with raw nerves and high hopes. It was perhaps the only time I had ever seen Mr Cool in Dad-mode and nervous.

Looking back, I realise the tail end of 2010s was a period of profound personal upheaval for Rampal. In May 2018, he and Jesia had announced their separation in a joint statement, marking the end of a marriage of two decades. A few months later, his mother Gwen passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer. By the time his divorce was finalised in November 2019, it wasn’t just his marriage in the rear-view mirror but also his friendships within Bollywood’s most exclusive social circles. 

In an interview he did earlier this year for the YouTube channel Cancelled to Crowned With Sohini, the actor refers to this period as ‘the loneliest’. “I was losing everybody who was close to me. I had lost my father three years before that. I was losing friends. I was losing everything that I had worked so hard to get,” he said. The actor credits Demetriades, who he met soon after, for bring stability to his life and helping weather the storm.

With two sons under the age of 10 now in the mix, fatherhood has taken on a whole new dimension for Rampal. “Boy energy is so different,” he says with a laugh. “Their testosterone levels are through the roof.” His parenting style, though, hasn’t changed; he doesn’t believe in a one-size-fits-all approach. “Every child is unique. They are going to grow up and have their own life and journey. As a parent, you are an integral part of that journey, but our job is to identify the uniqueness of every child and mould them accordingly. How I am with Mahikaa is not how I am with Myra or Ariv and Arik,” he explains.

Between a career that is finding new momentum, a thriving family and a home that has given him room to rediscover himself, Rampal seems to have arrived at a happier, more settled place in life. He loves his new life in Goa. “There’s a little city life, great F&B scene, it’s got beaches and hills. Life doesn’t get monotonous because there is just so much to do here.” 

The cherry on the cake? “There are a lot of cool, like-minded people from different professions who don't just talk about films. I feel alive here.” 

Credits

Chairperson: Avarna Jain

CEO: Debashish Ghosh

Editor: Rahul Gangwani

Editorial Mentor: Saira Menezes

Managing Editor: Sonal Nerurkar

Styling & Creative Direction: Komal Shetty

Photographer: Dhruvin Shah

Hair: Rehan | Team Hakim Aalim

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Location Courtesy: Brij Paraiso, Goa

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Artist Reputation Management: Communique Film PR

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Fashion Editor: Komal Shetty

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Head of Copy Desk: Prannay Pathak

Senior Features Writer: Jeena J Billimoria

Digital Writers: Aditi Tarafdar, Arshita Suri, Rudra Mulmule

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