Always Restless, Always Ready: The Unstoppable Varun Dhawan

How can I begin the story of a Bollywood actor without first talking about this mad, mad city that has never learnt to tell its gods apart from its film stars? It is the last day of Ganesh Chaturthi and, today, the gods, dressed in marigold and tinsel, are leaving the city for the sea.

Varun Dhawan is stuck in traffic and he is trying and failing to get home. He is, depending on who you ask, either Bollywood's most bankable boy-next-door or one of its favourite nepo-kids, who has built a career mostly on his effortless comic charm. But Dhawan has taken his share of detours too: Badlapur (2015), October (2018), Sui Dhaaga (2018) and, recently, Border 2 where he plays a real-life Param Vir Chakra recipient (Colonel Hoshiar Singh Dahiya). When the line connects, he is still in the passenger seat, cap pulled low, earphones tucked in, looking down on his phone. Something about the hunch of him makes me think of a man reading a letter he's been putting off opening. Or maybe that's just Sandese Aate Hai surfacing.

If I'm being honest, he does look a little uptight, though that might just be the car with its low ceiling and two feet of legroom. He doesn't have a smile on his face. It's the first thing I notice, mostly because I've spent the better part of the week researching him, watching interviews new and old where he is unguarded and quick to smile, that much-memed, lopsided smile. He can be really funny, too, because more than once I forgot that I was to take notes.

It was somewhere in that pile of videos that I found my first question.

On a podcast with comedians Tanmay Bhat and Zakir Khan, offhand, visibly pleased with the line as it left him, he had said actors today have gotten "bahut uptight" compared to their ’90s counterparts. None of them asked him why. The two otherwise professionally curious men let it go, and I remember shifting in my seat, irritated.

Did Dhawan remember standing too close to the television watching those old interviews, before any of this was his life? Had he ever stood before a mirror, taking a question meant for Shah Rukh or Sanjay Dutt as his own? Did he practise the smile? The shrug? Is that where the ease comes from, the reason he isn't as touchy as his peers, generous even with the ones mocking him, always answering with the very same smile that people love to imitate?

"We actors are seen so much nowadays," he says. The world has changed and, of course, he means social media. Everything is now forever and it is replayed.

“A man laughing used to just be a man laughing. Now someone is always asking: Why? Why is he so happy? Why is he smiling so much?" he says. "So much is out there for people to judge you on. Not everything is a public appearance. Sometimes you're just with your friends, being a fool about something, because that's what you do with friends. But if you try to share that side…"

He tilts his head down as he says this, and I catch four yellow letters on his cap, cut off before I can make out the word. “There have been so many instances when I've been innocently fooling about something, literally just to make light of the situation, but have been taken seriously and then reprimanded. It-was-a-JOKE!”

I hear, underneath the sentence, something like irritation but unless it's something about his craft, none of it really touches him anymore. The comments section is a verdict machine though, running all day and night. ‘He should be doing more serious films like October or Sui Dhaaga.’ ‘Sir please one movie with your father again.’ ‘Why does everyone hate him, he’s literally so sweet.’ And under nearly every interview of his, someone, somewhere, calls him “humble”. Even his favourite guilty pleasure snack in between takes has the ring of it: it is Parle-G dipped in garam garam chai. I ask him if he wonders why that word, of all the words available, has been assigned to him, time and again.

"I have no idea. I would get a lot of ‘humble’ in my childhood as well. I never understood it. I’d watch my friends do the exact same things I was doing, and none of them ever got called that.”

Star kids are after all pre-forgiven for being smug, a little entitled. He likes to believe he never cashed that in. “I think that's a wrong notion. When someone is in a place of privilege, they need to use it to help others. If you don't do that, it is strange to me." It is perhaps the same quality Anushka Sharma was getting at when she said, sitting beside him for a Film Companion interview, that he was the most secure actor she had worked with and could be the one to lead the pay-parity movement in Bollywood.

***

Dhawan is free of the road and has now made it to his building. Trees crowd the window at his back. Yellow flowers blur into something like sunlight. He is talking about his father now. Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai could be the swan song of David Dhawan, who has spent close to four decades making Bollywood laugh. I had read that Dhawan senior was hot-headed and difficult on the set, sending his son to tears. I ask if that's true. “No. No. I got way more emotional during that time because of his health. I had not seen him like that before. That was hard on me, as a son. And having to work through it. It's unexplainable.” He is quick to make it bigger than himself. “I do feel that a lot of people my age go through this—working while their parents are unwell. Life moves on, and you're expected to keep working. I think only you, as a person, as a child, know what you're actually going through when you have to show up with a work face on.”

Their time together now orbits food, cinema and, inevitably, cricket. “He's also very much part of most decisions of mine and Rohit [his brother]. I love discussing choices, discussing directors with him, and feel privileged, honestly, that I get to do that.”

Their discussions haven't always been quite so harmonious. When Dhawan was starting out, he wanted to find his way through independent cinema and went as far as secretly auditioning for Kiran Rao’s Dhobi Ghat. He dreamt desperately of being launched by Anurag Kashyap and once said he would have given his right arm for it. Instead, the debut happened with Karan Johar’s Student of the Year (2012), glossy and commercial, about as far as he could get from Kashyap's Bollywood. His father’s response, when the story came up at a film festival, was hilariously succinct: “Thank God.”

His father, Dhawan tells me, thought that he was just too young, too new, too untested to start where he wanted. Even now, the 39-year-old actor says, “There’s still a child in me who wants to surprise my father with my work.” He looks away from the screen for a beat, then back at me. “He loved me in Border 2. It is commercial cinema at its peak but not easy to pull off. I don't fit like a glove into that world. So, to go there, and get that much love for the character... that was gratifying,” he says, of portraying a disciplined, composed and sincere military officer rooted in historical reality, as opposed to the brooding men he’s essayed in Badlapur (2015) and Kalank (2019).

His father, he says, still worries when he strays from the commercial path. “He has had such a big career. He’s seen the ups and downs,” Dhawan adds. “I also have this urge to experiment, which sometimes scares him.” His mother, Karuna, meanwhile, seems to have fewer such reservations. “She feels that I’m capable of doing everything. She’s very ambitious for me.”

It was she who first enrolled him into his first acting workshop as a child. One of the many classes she signed him up for, hockey and karate and cricket and swimming. Anything that might tire him out by evening.

Whatever that childhood restlessness was, it hasn't fully left him. He spends most of the call on his feet, walking the length of the room. Track-mounted spotlights mark his walk like streetlights on an empty road. The boy who was obsessed with wrestling and The Rock, who would grow up to play a soldier and a werewolf, was nonetheless also ecstatic about playing Cinderella in a Prithvi Theatre production. He also remembers this one time he was asked to improvise during one of his acting classes, and out of all the scenarios he could have cooked up, he decided his character needed the toilet—urgently, and couldn't find one no matter how much he tried—besides having to rush to meet a girl he was meant to marry.

This is really what he still loves about acting; the physical work of it; the training, the dancing, the action, the sweat, all of it. His favourites are the roles that make his own body slightly unfamiliar to him. "I enjoy losing myself," he says. “There are only certain instances when I've been able to hit that level. It doesn't happen too often but when it does, I almost go into a trance. It is the greatest joy."

The actor is finding new ways to chase this feeling of being physically involved in something. It would be easy to call the newest and strangest turn in Dhawan’s life—the decision to buy a farm—a midlife gesture. But he calls it the biggest achievement of his life, bigger than any film. He is being more selective about those, too, now.

“I’ve heard a lot of scripts since last year. I can’t even begin to tell you how many,” he says, and when I ask what he is looking for, the old checklist seems to have fallen away. “When I started, it was one thing or the other. I was looking for action, romance or a certain genre I hadn't tried my hand at. Right now, I’m just looking for a feeling.”

Not being bored, of course, is the first rule. The call gets disconnected for a bit and I unwrap a small Lindt chocolate from my desk and think of the time I watched Bhediya (2022) in a hotel room in Bombay, over a half-melted pint of London Dairy Carmello with a friend after a particularly long conference. She suggested it while we were flipping through channels but it took the day off of us and we laughed ourselves to sleep. This is perhaps the charm and pleasure of a Varun Dhawan film. You don't always want to be changed by a film. And for every Badlapur, there have been five of the other sort: Main Tera Hero (2014), Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania (2014), Badrinath Ki Dulhania (2017), Judwaa 2 (2017) and Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari (2025). More often than not, he's got two heroines to choose between, trying to squeeze in as many love stories as the runtime would allow. There are also engagements broken at the altar, the mandatory railway and airport pursuits, the whole chiffon-and-thunder machinery of the Hindi romcom, which he has never once seemed embarrassed to be good at.

Yet now, from here, at the strange midpoint between everything he has already donned and everything he still hopes to make, what he really calls a dream project now is still a love story (saga, might be a better word perhaps); the big kind, with aching and pining in it, the kind we millennials grew up believing in.

It is really a short enough step from there to his own love story. He met Natasha on a school basketball court when he was all of 11. "I know I was a child but somehow it felt like this is it. She's the one," he tells me, and he knows exactly how that sounds, but says it anyway. As someone who's been in one relationship for all her adult life, I mention the beautiful oddness of knowing someone for years and meeting them over and again across all the selves they become. He nods profusely.

"They keep growing and you keep growing. The evolution keeps continuing," he says.

What's new, he tells me, unprompted, is watching Natasha as a mother. There was a time, before Lara, when the two of them could see their life stretching ahead without a child in it and could see nothing missing from the picture. "Now that we have Lara, some days I'm just sitting at home, watching Natasha with her, and I can't believe it. This is the same girl! It is amazing how she handles her." It is amazing, he says twice, in two different ways, like once wasn't enough.

Lara is two. She is, at the moment, deep into a Michael Jackson phase after her grandmother played her one of his songs. "And just like that, it went from Miss Rachel to Michael Jackson," he says, baffled and delighted in equal measure. He talks about fatherhood as a lot of fun, and also a lot of work. He doesn't want her raised on rules that don't make sense and he doesn't want her raised without any limits either.

"She is a kid now and we can splurge on her, but Natasha and I try not to.” He says his wife’s name first, and it is safe to guess that he's the one who'd cave first. Onscreen he hasn’t played a father too many times except in Baby John, which came out the year Lara was born. I ask him, finally, if he thinks about ageing, as an actor. “People still come to me with scripts where I am still in college,” he shakes his head and laughs an awkward laugh. It doesn't quite reach a complaint, but it's close.

By the time we are done, I have the feeling he has got his steps in for the day. Right at the end he finally sits down, adjusts his posture and his cap and for the first time, I can read the words on it: ICON. I wonder if this is his favourite cap, or one he reaches for on days he needs reminding. It, however, feels like a nice, accidental sign-off.

Credits

Chairperson: Avarna Jain

CEO: Debashish Ghosh

Editor and Words by: Rahul Gangwani

Editorial Mentor: Saira Menezes

Managing Editor: Sonal Nerurkar

Styling & Creative Direction: Mohit Rai

Photographer: Vansh Virmani

Hair: Hakim Alim

Grooming: Krishna Sarvadeshri

Styling Assistant: Ruchi Krishna

Location: Bastian Beach Club, Juhu

Bookings Editor: Varun Shah

Production House: Studio Little Dumpling

Artist Reputation Management: Communique Film PR

Fashion Director: Vijendra Bhardwaj

Fashion Editor: Komal Shetty

Deputy Editor: Mayukh Majumdar

Digital Editor: Saurav Bhanot

Features Editor: Nitin Sreedhar

Head of Copy Desk: Prannay Pathak

Senior Features Writer: Jeena J Billimoria

Digital Writers: Aditi Tarafdar, Arshita Suri, Rudra Mulmule

Senior Social Media Executive: Riti Ghai

Social Media Executive: Kashish Mishra

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