Vicky Kaushal and the school of life

It’s been 30 minutes and I’m starting to wonder if the interview is even going to happen. Suddenly the publicist’s phone pings, and Vicky Kaushal’s tall, statuesque frame bursts in through the door of the Matrix office in Khar, Mumbai. “So sorry, bro,” he says shaking my hand with both of his, in all earnestness. “Oh, don’t worry about it,” I sputter, thankful that he’s here and we can get started. His day has been busy—his son’s visa was to be sorted, he couldn’t leave his wife alone, and there’s been repair work going on in his building, he says, sounding like your average young husband and father with his daily household chores to take care of, not some Bollywood star with a platoon of staff to handle his every whim. 

Since becoming a father, Kaushal says he’s come to understand and appreciate “a lot more” of the work his parents did in raising him. “When I look at my upbringing in retrospect,” Kaushal explains, “I understand so many things that they were right about. We weren’t financially flying. So, there was that pressure. But they had the responsibility of instilling the right values in me,” he says, sort of nodding to emphasise the feeling.

Over the past seven months, the true scale of what it means to be a father, to raise a human being, and ready them for the big bad world outside appears to have fully dawned on him. “It occurs to me at the most random moments that that [instilling the right values] is now my responsibility towards my son,” he says. “He is going to learn by observing how his parents are thinking, talking, and behaving. So, I’ve realised whatever you want to see reflected in him has to come in your actions rather than words.”

There’s something faintly reassuring about Vicky and his optimistic perspective on fatherhood. He sounds like a thoughtful parent, one who can probably sing along to ‘Baby Shark’, knows what size diapers his son wears, and is at ease taking him around on the stroller. After what feels like a lifetime of fairly low expectations from dads, his is a growing breed of hands-on fathers who are aware that how we behave, at home or in public, is a product of how we were raised.

Currently in the early, bleary days of parenthood, Kaushal reveals that he took six weeks off when Vihaan was born and remembers the day he returned to work. Particularly the moment when he realised he would be away from his son for four days while shooting in Wai, about 230 km away from home. “My heart sank. It was hard,” he recalls. “There are so many new feelings that surface almost on a daily basis, because being a parent is new to me. I understand now when others would say ‘yaar, bacha kitna jaldi bada ho raha hai’ (the child is growing up so quickly). And I would think, ‘What you’re talking about? Your child is still a year old.’ Now I get it.”

Fatherhood is a new role for the actor who first got noticed for his performance in Masaan (2015). In fact, it seems to me this off-camera Vicky Kaushal is perhaps closer to Deepak Chaudhary, the character he played in the film. A sensitive, ambitious young man coming to terms with the world around him. That character, Kaushal says, changed him. But not for the obvious reasons. “Until then success, to me, was where you reached [in life]. It was never about where you started from,” he explains. “That character, starting from the crematorium ghat in Benaras [now Varanasi] and going on to work as an engineer in the Railways in Allahabad [now Prayagraj]... He had a far bigger life arc than I’ve covered in my life. Till today,” he says, tapping the arm rest for emphasis. “After that I started having so much empathy for those around me, especially those from far less privileged backgrounds, because I don’t know where they have started from.”

Like his character, Kaushal, too, is an engineer by training. But instead of pursuing a career as an electronics engineer, he tore up a job offer and decided to try his luck at acting. “I was always fascinated by cinema,” he tells me. “Sitting inside that black box watching the craft of storytelling and the magic unfold... I couldn’t get enough of it.”

As the conversation unfolds, weaving through his movies and his thoughts on cinema, his family, his father especially, is never far from being referenced. Like when I ask him about the best piece of advice he has ever received. No prizes for guessing—it was from his father. “Work with good directors… If you want to be here for the long run, it’s a director’s medium. Be part of good stories. The money, the fame, they will follow. And I have always followed his advice.” Or while discussing the early years leading up to Masaan. “My father told me, ‘I’m not a big guy who can help you. Be prepared to knock on doors,’” he recalls.

Kaushal senior, Sham Kaushal, if you don’t already know, is a prominent action director and stunt coordinator who’s worked on some of Bollywood’s biggest hits. Betaj Badshah (1994) Baaghi (1999), Devdas (2002), Don and Krissh (2006), 3 Idiots (2009), Padmaavat (2018), and Ponniyan Selvan I & II (2022-23), to name a few. If Kaushal junior isn’t giving me nepo kid energy, that’s probably because he’s seen the struggle up close. His father worked his way up from being a stuntman.

“When I was born, we were living in a chawl in Malvani,” he tells me, naming a distant Mumbai suburb. This Kaushal, too, has worked his way up, from the production trenches to the limelight. Vicky started his creative career with theatre, later signing up for assistant director gigs. He’s credited for his work on the multi-director anthology Mumbai Cutting (2008) and later Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur (2012).

“When I studied engineering, it was all theory. I can’t repair a thing to save my life,” says Kaushal, his hand swiping right in the air, as he explains why he took that route. “Back then I would pass this line of car repair shops and I would feel any worker there would be a better engineer than me. So, when I decided to be an actor, I decided to be a boy from those shops. I took acting classes, but I wanted to learn the craft through practice,” he says. “I wanted to first understand the logic of how it’s done.”

With over 20 movies to his credits since his debut, Kaushal appears to have grasped the logic pretty well, especially when you consider the box office. Uri: A Surgical Strike (2019), the movie that catapulted him to stardom, made over ₹340 crore. Sam Bahadur (2023) cashed ₹127 crore, and Chhaava, his most recent outing, netted over ₹800 crore worldwide. Kaushal has a lot more in the pipeline, including Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Love & War, which also stars Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt, and another movie of epic proportions, titled Mahavatar. How is the “middle-class Punjabi boy” from Malvani via Andheri coping with all the attention?

“I’ve become conscious about keeping life simple. Unknowingly and unintentionally, you can complicate it,” he states. “There’s a surplus of information coming at you; you can’t shut the door on it. You also have no control over how people perceive what you say and do.” Case in point, a viral clip where he’s seen making an achingly archaic wife joke. “There is no way that just because you’re a public figure, you need to be perfect,” he says responding to the outrage directed at him. “Sometimes we do deserve the brickbats, and maybe the learning there for me is that, as much as people are giving me love, it also comes with a certain sense of responsibility,” he says, like he’s given the matter some thought. “No actor has gotten fame and not gotten the flip side of it. I made the conscious choice that I wanted to be here, and the Universe is reciprocating. Now it’s on me how I handle [the fame]. And if the criticism is constructive, you can learn from it.”

I get the sense that Kaushal is someone who reflects on life and all its components. Like when the topic of hyper-masculine and toxic characters comes up in our conversation. His response is pragmatic. A ‘this too shall pass’ logic, applied alongside the box-office reception formula for today’s biggest grossing films like Pushpa (2021), Animal (2023), Tere Ishk Mein (2025), Kabir Singh (2019), and Saiyaara (2025). “I am constantly bringing myself to this axis of realism. I ask myself: what is truly important to you? If what’s being said is far from the truth, I know it and my close ones know it. That’s enough.” For him, close ones mean family, his parents, brother and wife, and his friends. “My core circle is still the graduation, engineering group of friends. I always credit them and my family for ensuring my head and heart are in the right place. For giving me that reality check when I need it. To the point that sometimes it gets a little too real for me,” he says, with a chuckle. “But I would rather have it that way than not.” Praise and adulation, he points out, seem to be coming his way anyway, “from all corners”. So, the reality check from his core group is necessary.

Moving on to a lighter topic, I ask that proverbial end-of-the-interview question that journalists unfailingly ask. What’s next for the actor? Does he see himself perhaps following in wife Katrina’s footsteps and turning entrepreneur? “The more I see how hard she works on every aspect of Kay Beauty, the more I feel that I’m not meant to run a business. At least not right now,” he says, his head and face moving from side to side in slow motion, underlining the message. “Katrina has great business acumen. She is driven. I have tremendous respect for her. But if I get into a business, I would first have to learn the ropes.” Like he did before he faced the camera. “And it would have to be an extension of me. As of today, I only see myself being creatively stimulated [as an actor].” Though, I’m reading “a maybe...but not yet” between the lines.

As the conversation draws to a close, it’s lunch time and we turn to talking about food. “We actors have to constantly be on a diet, right? It’s an occupational hazard. I have to drop weight, gain weight and whatnot. I’m constantly dreaming of things connected to food; my most saved videos on YouTube are food videos,” he says, wistfully. What’s his go-to when he can let go? “Cheese dosas served non-stop with coconut chutney, a tub of chicken lollipop and Schezwan sauce, and three hours of a Denzel Washington movie. It’s a weird combination, I know. But I love it. It’s my me-time meal routine after a long shoot schedule,” he replies. “Strangely, I don’t crave sugar. I crave carbs. I know the craving is back when I start to miss parathas, because that was my staple food growing up. Every breakfast was parathas with milk.” There’s that Punjabi boy again.

Editorial Direction: Megha Mahindru, Ridhima Sapre. Photography: Yii Ooi. DOP: Jeff Wangyu. Fashion and Creative Direction: Priyanka Kapadia. Visual and Creative Direction: Jay Modi. Art Direction: Harry Iyer. Bookings Editor: Nikita Moses. Set Design: Nikita Rao. Multimedia Designer: Mehak Jindal. Visual Editor: Ria Rawat. Makeup: Anil Sable. Hair: Shuaib Salmani / Team Hakim Aalim. Assistant: Jean (Photo); Kashish Jain (Style), Kashish Sinha (Style). Production: Imran Khatri Production, Radhika Chemburkar, Vishal Baniya