I would have said Shahid Kapoor is a hugely underrated actor if he didn’t think himself to be so good. If you have seen his latest film Jersey which opens in April , Shahid is constantly admiring his skills as an actor; considerable no doubt. But once the self-gaze falls on an actor it begins to cast a huge shadow over his career.
This is what has happened with Shahid. He has it all: the pedigree (his father, for those who came in late, is the great Pankaj Kapoor), the hits (his first film Kabir Singh was a smash, as were several others notably Vivah, Jab We Met, Udta Panjab) and the clean controversy-free image.
But many producers have told me they are wary of working with this Kapoor for his attitude.
Shahid knows his worth and he throws his weight around accordingly. I don’t know why he agreed to do Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmaavat knowing fully well that Ranveer Singh had the author-backed role. Not a single shot was cut: Shahid’s role in Padmaavat was exactly the way it was narrated to him. And yet he became progressively antsy about his co-star getting more publicity.
Just a few years earlier, Shahid was not the least afraid of taking the backseat, in Imtiaz Ali’s Jab We Met where every move was about making Kareena Kapoor look awards-worthy. Where she was a loud boisterous attention seeker Shahid was quiet, meditative and wounded. I thought Shahid was far superior to Kareena in Jab We Met. Like Sanjeev Kumar when pitched against Suchitra Sen in Aandhi.
Audiences don’t like showoffs. Whenever Shahid has curbed his tendency to be an attention-seeker, he has excelled. Even in his much-lauded Haider, Shahid was not playing out a Shakespearean tragedy but a Bollywood comedy: the comedy of showing the world what he is capable of.
Stop it! We know what you are capable of. We’ve seen it in Kaminey where you played the twins Charlie and Guddu as two separate individuals, separated by worth if not by birth. I haven’t seen anything like that from you in recent times. That performance in Kabir Singh smacked of self-indulgence especially when you soil yourself after getting stoned.
I hear you were in two minds about that sequence.
From ‘To be or not to be’ in the desi Hamlet (Haider) to ‘To pee or not to pee’ in Kabir Singh…that’s a long way from home.
Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based journalist. He's been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out.
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