On Hrithik Roshan’s birthday, a look ahead to Fighter and the second coming of a generational star

With Fighter, Hrithik Roshan continues to reprise the rewarding but familiar role of nationally decreed heartthrob. (Photo via X justSidAnand)

In an interview after the release of Vikram Vedha, Hrithik Roshan decoded his uneven career through the burden of expectation. Of his distinctly earthy performance in Super30 he said, “I was set free”. In the same interview, Roshan spoke candidly about the labour of playing to the a-tonal rhythms of stardom and instead finding sanity and fulfilment in the things that require a different ‘toolbox’. Unlike most actors in the history of Hindi cinema, Roshan quite literally catapulted to stardom overnight. His first step in the business grazed the ceiling of popularity and fandom that he has since tried to either alter, re-direct or reclaim. As he turns 50, a couple of weeks from the release of the highly anticipated Fighter, it’s worth asking if Roshan will finally ascend the throne left momentarily unoccupied by two of three Khans. Or if he even needs to.

The release of Fighter’s livery of groovy, foot-tapping numbers regurgitates the phenomenon that is Hrithik Roshan in the body and the flesh. A mesmerising, chiselled hunk of a man who floats, swirls, glides like an impresario effortlessly conducting and coaxing the rhythms of the gullible heart. It only makes sense that Siddharth Anand directed War with the kind of sensuality that cinema has used to eroticise men of Roshan’s ilk. There were days early in his career, when he invited comparisons with global icons like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. A phase ultimately wrested by poor choices.

Nothing in Roshan’s career until War at least, has come close to the phenomenal highs of Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai and Koi Mil Gya. Evolving tastes and the flat-lining of movie stardom has in hindsight attached an asterisk to each of these films. They seem, in the rear-view mirror at least, accidental beneficiaries of a subconscious palette-cleansing drive. Decades later, with a slew of mediocre films in the pipeline where he has credibly jostled for meat rather than means, Roshan returned to that fold of the Adonis, the hypersexualised, masculine focus of the cinematic gaze. If anything, Fighter feels like the continuation of the motifs that made War, as much a film as it was the delineation of a country’s erogenous zone.

To an extent Roshan is an anomaly. To the fantastical nature of cinema itself, he represents a specimen, a bodily exterior that feels otherworldly and dumbfounding. If mainstream cinema ought to offer magic and escape, Roshan seems like the ideal mix of pulverising elasticity and flawless features. To the point that even letting the actor keep his streaks of white - a veritable sign of his age – for War, felt like a creative masterstroke. It feels like cheat code, a gift as much as it also serves the cause of a silent, impregnable curse.

Roshan’s Vikram Vedha was a good film in every sense of the word. What stuck out, though, was the fact that his urban sensuality ultimately ate into a role that was meant to build itself from the street up. Despite the actor’s commitment, his commendable handling of the vernacular, his godliness stands out like a naked punchline. In the dank, ugly, messy lanes of a mofussil town, he pokes out like an obscene stunt, a totem of audacity. You see the character, but you also see the gorgeous superstar. It’s a problem that the actor has admitted he has had to live with. It’s not the worst problem to have but it complicates the chequered path to diving into any role that can’t prevent the starry quality from floating back to the surface of things.

Ever since his debut, Roshan has tasted substantial success, but nothing akin to the hysteria or fandom that the three Khans have come to be known for. Super30 and Vikram Vedha were both obvious attempts at blending in and reaching out to a more diverse audience. But Roshan also seems hamstrung by the milieu he seems to naturally attract as a matter of existence. He is a metrosexual, youthful, demi-god to most of urban India. To the rural half, he maybe represents elusive progeny that feels too good or distant to be true. Which is why some of his best performances including Zindagi Naa Milegi Dobara, Jodha Akbar and Vikram Vedha have received acclaim but not nearly as much mass love as they maybe deserved. With Fighter, he continues to reprise the rewarding but familiar role of nationally decreed heartthrob. But can the actor take this surface-level whim and attention and fly it to a place where mania, madness and obsession become vitals as opposed to incidentals? Time, surely, will tell.