Redefining 50

STARUPDATE

From a dwarf to a womanizer, Shah Rukh Khan’s  upcoming roles reflect depth and versatility.

At 50, Shah Rukh Khan has turned over a new leaf. For long the superstar has been entertaining audiences as the quintessential, chocolate hero who sweeps every woman off her feet with just one glance, fights off bad guys to get his girl and sings for her with his arms wide open. However, ever since his 50th birthday last year, SRK’s preference for projects seems to have taken a 180 degree turn towards the edgy, hard-hitting and unconventional. First off the list to make it to the big screen was Fan that saw him play both his real, super star self and an obsessive fan. The latter was the more difficult one to pull off; it required him to look a lot younger and go straight back to his acting roots that put him on the radar with an anti-hero potential. Fan’s Gaurav was a class act – restless, extreme and eccentric – yet Fan did not find too many fans in the audience. As filmmaker Aanand L. Rai recently said in an interview “it’s the audience that demands that SRK be shown in a romantic role” and so SRK’s first experiment turned out to be a mixed bag of sorts.

However, the King is determined. His upcoming line-up of films places him in far more varied and seemingly intelligent roles that have often been a one-off in SRK’s career over the past 24 years (yes, he is just a year away from his silver jubilee in the Indian film industry). We already know about SRK’s character of a badass bootlegger in Raees, which is scheduled to release early next year, but it’s not all that the new brand of SRK has in store for us. The actor will be playing the role of a dwarf in Aanand L Rai’s next and, according to a recent report by DNA India, SRK will be seen essaying a womanizer in Imtiaz Ali’s upcoming project, tentatively titled The Ring. The role, which is said to be inspired from that of Dev Anand’s in Guide, will also pitch him in the act of a tour guide but one who is quite the playboy.

All said and done, it’s not the first time that SRK has tried to dip his feet into something that is completely out of his comfort zone. He has played a robot in Ra. One, a confused NRI with a passion for his nation in Swades and an aggressive, failed hockey player in Chak De India but there have been few that he has been able to green light. One hopes that in this new journey, SRK evolves naturally and as a performance artist than just being the star that he is, in every character, and that he doesn’t go back to lazily sending himself up again.