Akshay Kumar: Bollywood’s $65m man

He’s one of the highest-paid actors in the world — but sets about his craft with humility. He discusses his latest movie ‘Mission Mangal’ Share on Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on LinkedIn (opens new window) Share on Whatsapp (opens new window) Save Save to myFT Nirpal Dhaliwal YESTERDAY 11 Akshay Kumar is in relaxed, chatty mood when we meet in Kensington, London. Knowing that I am, like him, a Punjabi, the 51-year-old Bollywood star initially addresses me in our mother tongue, asking about the villages where my parents were born before they moved to the UK. Handsome and lean in a crushed fabric jacket and sky-blue loafers, he is the embodiment of conviviality. It’s when Kumar speaks his mother tongue that I get the truest sense of his character. My Punjabi, unlike his English, isn’t perfect, but every time we lapse into it he transforms from a charming but circumspect interviewee into a bantering companion, taking my hand and talking to me as if we were cousins. “Other actors, they take two or three months to get into character,” he says. “They lock themselves away and really torture themselves . . . Idiots!” He shakes his head. “I can’t do that. I take two or three days and that’s it. I want to get the movie done!”

https://www.ft.com/content/04753cea-ae2f-11e9-b3e2-4fdf846f48f5

With 127 movies to his name, and reported earnings of $65m last year alone, Kumar is as breezy about his failures as his craft. “There was a time when I had 16 consecutive flops,” he says. “The media said I was finished. They said I was furniture. They were being kind, actually. I was a whole showroom.” How did he break that losing streak? “I’m a producer’s man. I’m punctual, I do the work, I pay my hotel phone bill. I get my films shot in 30 to 40 days. I save producers money. When you do that, even if the movie flops the producer stays with you and you will get the next movie.” Those flops lasted from 2003-06, but long before that Kumar’s career began in 1987 with a string of failures that would have destroyed most aspiring actors. It wasn’t until his fifth movie, Khiladi (Player) — about college pranksters pulling off a heist — that he enjoyed his first modest box-office success and started carving a niche as an action hero.

Kumar on the set of his latest film, 'Mission Mangal' “I didn’t think about it,” he laughs, when asked how he dealt with failure. “I was having a lot of fun, doing something I really enjoyed.” India’s most bankable film star is no anguished artist. “I’m still not a great actor,” he admits. “Every day I am learning how to act.” Yet he is the fourth highest-paid actor in the world, and the only non-Hollywood actor on the latest Forbes 100 list for the entertainment industry. August 15, India’s independence day, sees the release of his latest film, Mission Mangal (“Mangal” being the Sanskrit name for Mars), based on the country’s 2014 Mars Orbiter mission. His mother is a producer on the film, along with Disney’s Indian subsidiary Fox Star. India became the fourth nation to reach Mars when it sent a probe to the planet. The mission was also notable for the prominent role played by female scientists. “I was fascinated by how these women scientists juggle their lives,” he says. “They get up, they pray, they make breakfast, check their husband is OK and take their kids to school, and then they tuck their saris in and go to work.”

When I said I was making a movie called‘Toilet’ everyone in the industry said, ‘You’ve gone mad’ Kumar plays a scientist, Rakesh Dhawan, who provides the prerequisite elements for Bollywood success: “He has a song for every moment. He’s very witty. He has a line for everything.” Bollywood often trades in fantasy, depicting billionaire lifestyles with musical routines set amid the Swiss Alps or Egyptian pyramids, but, says Kumar, “I don’t feel any identification with those films.” He has starred in a few of them, but emphasises that he wants to make films “that are joined to our earth, our village . . . The roots are very important. And people like films that are very rooted.” In recent years, Kumar has found commercial and critical success with offbeat material that speaks to ordinary Indian concerns. He produces films he doesn’t star in, but only stars in films he himself has produced. His 2018 movie Padman was inspired by the story of Arunachalam Muruganantham, a Tamil social entrepreneur who invented a mini sanitary-pad-making machine that supplies Indian women at less than a third of the cost of commercial products. Similarly, his 2017 hit Toilet: A Love Story is a comedy-drama about the tensions between a college-educated woman and her new husband caused by her rustic in-laws’ inadequate lavatory facilities. He was a producer on both films. Kumar’s taste for offbeat material perhaps isn’t surprising: he’s an outsider who wasn’t born into one of the dynasties that have dominated the Indian movie business. The son of an army officer from Amritsar, he grew up in Delhi’s unglamorous Chandni Chowk neighbourhood, before moving to Mumbai when his father got a job as an accountant with Unicef. Kumar quit college to study Thai boxing in Bangkok and work as a waiter, before returning to Mumbai and opening a martial arts school. He moved into modelling, and got his screen role at 21. Akshay Kumar in 'Padman' Films such as Padman, Toilet and even Mission Mangal are “commercially very risky”, he says, but he gives them “commercial nuance” by weaving more common Bollywood elements into the material, such as family drama, romance, comedy and musical sequences. “I don’t take the audience for granted,” he says. “There’s maybe a mother who is sad in the movie, a father who is angry, and four songs . . . I take a lot of time with the writer to create the screenplay so that it all feels very natural. It’s not easy to take subjects like these and bring them to the country as commercial cinema.” Kumar is not the first star to make successful Bollywood films with homespun themes. In 2016, Aamir Khan starred in Dangal (“Wrestling Match”), which told the true story of Mahavir Singh Phogat, who trained his two daughters to become India’s first world-class wrestlers. And Shahrukh Khan has long played everyday characters. But Kumar stands out for choosing subjects that others shy away from: “When I said I was making a movie called Toilet everyone in the industry said, ‘You’ve gone mad.’” He brings to film-making the focus, dedication and humility required of his previous career as a martial arts instructor. But he attributes his success — and his level-headed attitude to it — to his upbringing. A nod to the traditionally cattle-raising, dairy-loving Punjabi culture, he tells me his family motto was: “Eat butter, eat cream, be happy!”