Rohit Saraf Has Arrived, But Isn’t Ready To Settle

The first thing Rohit Saraf does after wrapping his Esquire India cover shoot is call his mother and tell her to look at the sky.

“Mumma, the sunset is so beautiful. Are you looking at it?” he asks as we settle into his car for the drive from Worli to Bandra. Outside, Mumbai is performing one of its more effective magic tricks, turning an otherwise muggy evening pink and orange over the sea. “I’m done with the shoot, I’m coming home. You see the sunset. It’s very beautiful today. And click pictures for me.”

He hangs up. I assume we will begin the interview.

We do not.

“Wow, I absolutely love the colour of the sky.”

A few seconds later: “Holy shit.”

And then, with considerably more feeling, “The sunset is so fucking fantastic.”

Saraf has his phone up against the window now, trying to photograph it. He loves the sea, he tells me. He loves sunsets. They “single-handedly” inspire him. He remembers becoming properly conscious of this at around 15 or 16, although beautiful skies had been part of his life long before then. Saraf was born in Kathmandu and spent the first few years of his life in Nepal before his family moved to Delhi. They continued returning long after they had left, and his memories of the place are wonderfully specific: a large backyard, a pine tree and hailstorms that turned everything white.

At 15, Saraf uprooted himself once again, only this time, he was heading for Mumbai to become an actor. It was a decision that seems particularly audacious when you consider how little autonomy most 15-year-olds are entrusted with. Over the years, the story of his arrival has acquired a more cinematic provenance than Saraf remembers living through. One recent account had him coming to Mumbai with barely any money, a detail he is quick to contest.

“It’s not like I came from no money,” he says. “Sure, that’s dramatic and that’s full of masala, but it’s not the truth at all.”

His family supported him financially for the first two or three years. They were not affluent, he says, but they were comfortable enough. In Mumbai, his living arrangements were less straightforward—he mentions hostels and other places, without going into too much detail. The uncertainty he remembers was less about money than about being on his own. He had spent much of his childhood under the solicitous watch of his family, with even school trips and sleepovers largely off the table and now found himself in Mumbai with an alarming amount of agency.

“The first year was very, very scary. It was uncertain. Suddenly, there was so much freedom, and I didn’t know what to do with it.”

Curiously, freedom had never been the inducement. “I didn’t move because I wanted freedom or I wanted to party,” he says. “I really just wanted to be in films. I wanted to see myself on TV.”

Fourteen years later, Saraf has rather comprehensively fulfilled the adolescent brief. His father had spotted the proclivity even earlier. Rohit was forever dancing, painting, performing and posing “like a hero” for photographs; Suresh Saraf had little trouble imagining where all that theatricality might eventually deposit his son.

He died when Rohit was 11.

I ask Saraf if he can locate the moment his father’s dream became his own.

“I don’t think it can ever stop being his dream,” he says. “There was no singular point where it became mine. It just organically became more and more my dream on a daily basis.”

It is a surprisingly unpossessive way of speaking about an ambition that has consumed almost half his life. Saraf makes no attempt to apportion the dream neatly between father and son. Fourteen years of auditions, sets, failures and successes later, the provenance seems to matter less to him than the fact that he kept choosing it.

Somewhere on the Sea Link, his eyes wander from me to the window. “Shit, this looks very pretty. I have to take a picture.”

People in his life make fun of how disproportionately happy they make him. For several years, he has tried to understand the source of this affliction but no luck. “I don’t know what it is,” he says. “The sunsets just make me so fucking happy.”

***

Outside, the evening has turned a particularly lurid shade of pink over the water; inside, our conversation about grief is briefly adjourned for photography. Saraf, I am learning, is magnificently distractible in the presence of a good sky.

Once he has documented it to his satisfaction, I ask who taught him how to be a man when his father wasn’t around.

“My mother,” he says.

There is scarcely a beat before the answer. His parents married young and, in Saraf’s telling, his father was still being educated in manhood himself. “I think it’s my mother who made him the man that he was.”

His own education has been similarly matriarchal. Saraf grew up with his mother and three sisters, and adulthood has done little to disturb the arrangement; many of the people he trusts most professionally are women. “I’ve grown up around women,” he says. For all the industry’s current interest in what sort of leading man he might become, Saraf seems refreshingly incurious about arriving at a finished definition of one. “You don’t ever stop learning how to be a man.”

Bollywood offered its own lessons. At 15 and 16, he could audition for as many as 20 commercials in a week and come away with nothing. “Hard work and the outcome are two very, very independent things,” he says. Rejection still had teeth then. “I would get dejected. I would cry, complain to my mother and my sisters.” It took him years to understand how little of an actor’s fate is actually in their hands. “So much of it has absolutely nothing to do with you.”

His first film furnished a rather emphatic example. Saraf shot it at 16 and waited nearly two years for a release that never came. He eventually found his way onto screens with Dear Zindagi (2016) and Hichki (2018), before The Sky Is Pink (2019) gave him his first real brush with what it felt like to be known.

During promotions for the film in 2019, Saraf was at Amity University with co-star Priyanka Chopra Jonas when a crowd began chanting her name. Chopra pulled him forward, introduced him and started chanting his name instead. Thousands joined her. Saraf had spent seven years wondering what it might sound like to have strangers know his name. “I can still hear it ringing in my ears,” he says. He called his mother afterwards. She cried. “It felt like the sky was hugging me.”

It would be almost indecently convenient if, at that exact moment, I didn’t glance out of the window and discover that the sky had obligingly turned pink. The Sky Is Pink was also the first film in which I remember properly noticing Saraf, which I tell him. He looks delighted.

The recognition he once longed for has arrived. I ask what it has failed to give him. “Certainty,” he says immediately. “You could be at the top of your game and then suddenly not.” Saraf once imagined that enough work might eventually purchase some permanence. Instead, each success appears merely to have revised his definition of enough. “The bar keeps rising.”

Mismatched raised the temperature considerably. When the Netflix series arrived in 2020, Rishi Singh Shekhawat came equipped with old-fashioned romance, earnestness and an almost indecent supply of emotional availability. The internet promptly appointed Saraf its “national crush”. Fan pages christened him “Future Husband”. Rishi had escaped the screen and saddled his actor with a reputation for being extremely marriageable.

Meeting Saraf does little to acquit him. He has, after all, just called his mother to insist she look at a pretty sunset.

Earlier that afternoon at the shoot, I arrive while he is changing and “Baby, where the hell is my husband?” is playing through the studio speakers, an accidental bit of programming so on-the-nose it feels planted. After the final look, Saraf finds me waiting near the trial room, walks over and offers his hand. “Hi, I’m Rohit.”

This is perhaps redundant after an afternoon spent watching an entire studio orbit him, but charming, nonetheless. The sweetness, then, appears to be genuine. The soft boi label, however, is another matter.

Saraf has spent much of his twenties playing boys whose chief qualification is that women might reasonably trust them with their feelings. More recently, the roles—and most conspicuously, the physique—have begun to change. For Nikkhil Advani’s The Revolutionaries (2026), he spent nearly 15 months training, with Brad Pitt in Fight Club among the early physical references.

“I was definitely not Brad Pitt from Fight Club,” he says.

It makes for an irresistible piece of career arithmetic. Soft boy plus muscle equals leading man but Saraf refuses the sum. “I’m not trying to build an image or a perception,” he says. “I’m quite literally biologically growing up. I was 15 years old when I started. I’m 29 now.”

This distinction matters to him. “I do think it is a conscious decision in terms of what challenges me more,” he says. “What’s not a conscious decision is picking roles because I think it’ll help me build an image. There’s a difference and I feel like I’m very aware of that.”

Even the body, the most visible evidence for a supposed reinvention, came after he was cast in The Revolutionaries. “I got the role when I was still the softer boy.”

What surprised him was what happened once the body changed. “People’s response to how you look is almost instant and immediate.” Fifteen months of training altered something more private too. “How you carry yourself, how you walk into rooms, how much more confident you feel just knowing that you are taking care of yourself…” He pauses to clarify that he wasn’t underconfident before. “But I see myself very, very differently now.”

The muscles may photograph better, but Saraf seems more interested in what they did to the man carrying them. “It changed the game.”

The rooms have changed too. “If I want to meet someone, I think all I have to do is request and I would get a meeting, perhaps.”

Perhaps is doing some heavy lifting there. Saraf won’t presume a door will open before he has actually knocked on it. What he will concede to having acquired since his early twenties is “perspective”.

Access, he knows, is its own currency in Bollywood, although he has never been particularly assiduous about collecting it. “I’ve never gone to a party or a dinner or a screening because I thought it would get me work.” Nor does he turn this into a badge of honour. “I also don’t want to be dismissive of the fact that these things do help. It hasn’t helped me, but I do know that it does.”

The first room that felt different came after The Sky Is Pink, when the film’s producer Siddharth Roy Kapur and Vidya Balan invited him home for dinner. Saraf remembers music, excellent food and two hosts he adored. 

His first brush with Bollywood’s inner circle was, rather charmingly, a very good dinner.

***

“Bada hero hai.”

A transgender person peers through the car window, clocks Saraf and beams.

Saraf laughs and begins arranging to send them some money. Then they call him Allu Arjun and Saraf cracks up. For all the talk of access and recognition, celebrity can still be wonderfully approximate.

Saraf himself has spent enough of his life being looked at to know that people will fill in whatever he leaves blank. For years, Rishi Singh Shekhawat’s romantic earnestness did much of the work; Instagram supplies a little more. Lately, so has a body that sits rather differently inside a T-shirt.

Saraf himself is less forthcoming. “I try to be as organic and authentic as I possibly can,” he tells me. Performing Rohit Saraf for public consumption feels unnatural to him, which is a faintly inconvenient instinct for a man who performs for a living. He understands, though, why audiences occasionally confuse the actor with the men he plays. “People have very little access to my personal life,” he says. Audiences have spent hours with Rishi and considerably less with Rohit; eventually, the borders become porous.

What becomes apparent over the course of our conversation is that Saraf is particular about those borders. The penniless-outsider story gets corrected. So does the supposed physical reinvention, then the idea that tougher roles amount to a carefully engineered masculine makeover. Even networking receives its caveat. Saraf doesn’t bristle at being interpreted; he simply seems constitutionally incapable of leaving an imprecise version of himself unattended.

When I suggest that the Hindi-film leading man may now demand a more conventional machismo than the boys who made Saraf famous, he barely lets the premise settle.

“Shah Rukh Khan was a soft boi.”

Touché.

The definition of a leading man is ever-changing,” he continues. The larger-than-life hero has had his reign; so has the romantic one. “Cinema is a reflection of society,” he says, and what society wants from its men keeps changing with it.

Saraf is equally reluctant to outsource his decisions. He has a small coterie he trusts—his longtime manager Kim, agent Rajeev Masand, casting professionals—but the final word remains stubbornly his. “I’ve never really had anyone who tells me what to do,” he says. The one piece of paternal advice he wishes he received concerns money. “Finances. Like, investments.” He has been making his own decisions since 15. Now, at 29, he’s still at it. Conveniently, this also settles the matter of accountability. “Then I don’t have to blame anyone.”

The actor is also refreshingly free of the piety that can accompany conversations about craft. Acting is what he has chosen to give his life to and he would like a good life in return.

“I don’t want to say that I’m so madly in love with my craft that nothing else matters and only my craft matters,” he says. “I think I would be dishonest if I said that.”

The ambitions are specific. “Of course, I want a certain house for myself and for my family. I want them to enjoy a certain life of pleasures and I, of course, work hard for that.”

There is only one acquisition he seems suspicious of: the feeling that he has enough. “I don’t think I ever want to have a day where I feel like, ‘I’ve totally made it.’”

The possibility of complacency bothers him. There will always be another part worth chasing, another version of his life that looks slightly better from where he is standing. For all the pragmatism with which Saraf talks about his profession, there remains something almost unreasonable about the faith he places in himself.

“If you believe in it, you can do it.”

How literally does he mean that?

“There is absolutely nothing that can come in between you and what you want if you just make the decision that you want it.”

Nothing?

“You can’t be uncertain. Let the world around you be uncertain. Let the world question you, but you can’t be questioning yourself.”

He thinks for a moment.

“Question yourself as much as you want,” he says, revising the rule almost as soon as he has made it. “But the day you make that decision that I want it, after that don’t question yourself. And then just work hard.”

By the time we reach Bandra, Saraf has spent the better part of an hour being remarkably precise about what he means and occasionally changing his mind about precisely what that is. It has also been a long day, and he is ready to go home.

The sunset has disappeared by now. His mother, presumably, has the pictures.

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.