Flashback (2005) | ‘Dad said, just keep working’: How Abhishek Bachchan overcame his phase of flops

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated August 29, 2005)

Abhishek Bachchan is standing tall in the middle of a narrow, winding street at a fishing village in Mumbai, wearing a purple Pathan suit, a fierce fake scar running down his left eye. The light is fading and the director wants him to hurry when a harmonica suddenly begins to play in one of the tiny houses on each side of the noisy street. It is the tune his father played to serenade his mother in Sholay three decades ago. He listens attentively. And smiles.

At 29, with three films that have grossed over Rs 100 crore at the box office this year, Abhishek has not been so deafened by the sound of his own success that he is oblivious to his surroundings. A child of privilege, he is a graduate of the hard knocks school of struggling actors.

For four years the knocks came fast and furious. Seventeen flops in a row, a very public break-up with girlfriend of over seven years, actor Karisma Kapoor, and unkind comparisons with a father whose career is resurgent. But finally, the son of the king is a sought-after star and is working with the best and the brightest in Indian cinema, crossing genres and camps. This month saw the Locarno premiere of Antar Mahal, a Bengali film directed by Rituparno Ghosh and produced by his father's company.

Next month, as soon as he completes school senior Rohan Sippy's black comedy Bluff Master (their second film together), he will begin the Mumbai schedule of childhood friend Karan Johar's Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna. In October, he reprises his role as ACP Jai Dixit in a sequel of last year's hit, Yash Raj Films' Dhoom, with sometime car pool co-passenger Uday Chopra.

Coming up later are movies with Ram Gopal Varma and Mani Ratnam, both of whom he first met in his star son avatar. So hectic has the year been with back-to-back successes in Bunty Aur Babli, Sarkar and Dus that he had to refuse—regretfully—a key role in Mira Nair's The Namesake.

With the Khan trio (Shah Rukh, Aamir and Salman) slowing down at 40, Hrithik Roshan choosing to work once a year and Saif Ali Khan firmly ensconced in the romantic comedy niche, Abhishek seems the actor most likely to lead Generation Next—John Abraham is too hunky, Vivek Oberoi too clunky and Shahid Kapur way too chunky.

Having clod-hopped his way through his early career, Abhishek's style has matured into an individualistic one. Self-confessed fan Varma says he blends action and comedy with the same ease as his father did in Amar Akbar Anthony or Don. His timing also appears to be perfect. Starved of a new phenomenon for over a decade, the industry seems to be almost willing the success of the second generation of Bollywood's first family.

Abhishek has pulled himself up by his Harley Davidson bootstraps and shown he can act, dance (evident in Kajrare and Dus Bahane), be eligibly dishy for the swoon squad, and as Johar—whom Abhishek fondly calls KJo—puts it, be a "walking, talking vitamin". Among an array of boys, he appears to be all man—the kind of guy, says co-star Shilpa Shetty, she would look at twice even if she didn't know who he was. A guy who still hasn't shaved his chest—which is always discreetly displayed, a big plus for a female audience overdosing on the metrosexual male.

It is they who are powering his ascent to hottiedom, and who find in him the perfect blend of well brought-up boy and classic man, clean enough to bring home to mama and naughty enough for a dirty weekend, dutiful enough to be living at home and edgy enough to have a playboy reputation. Sikandar Kher, the 24-year-old son of Kirron Kher, and a dear friend, recalls wading with Abhishek through waist high water during the recent floods because he wanted to check on his grandmother in the house down the road from their home, Jalsa. "It was dark and filthy. Yet when we passed the girls' college in Juhu, they were screaming his name," he says.

For a generation weaned on malls, multiplexes and mega media, Abhishek seems to balance Indian family values with an international polish acquired over a decade of living abroad. Not every Hindi film actor can have the following resume: speaks French, can ski, sang hymn sin the school choir, played basketball and was on the school high jump team. Or be as at home at a sankat mochan puja in Allahabad as at a hip hop club night in Mumbai. What's more, at 6 ft 3 in, none of the heroines, many of them former models, has to wear flats or stand in a trench next to him. If they are lucky, he will also make them laugh.

Yesterday's values, today's modernism and tomorrow's hope, is how Johar sums him up. Sippy—who was inundated with desperate calls from women after Abhishek playfully passed off Sippy's number as his own on Johar's chat show—calls him India's Will Smith, a heart breaker with a cute quotient. Yet, apart from a smaller waist size—32 inches thanks to the time spent in his personal gym every day—he seems exactly how he used to be. Argumentative to the point of being nasty, but also articulate, bratty and shy. So shy that Sikandar says he refuses to walk into a restaurant or a club alone.

As he sits in his office-cum-den, right behind the landmark bungalow in Mumbai's suburbs he shares with his famous parents, fidgeting with a giant paintbrush gifted to his mother by M.F. Husain, he slowly grows into the conversation. A painting by his niece, Navya Naveli, lies directly above a bookshelf where the tools of his trade are neatly arranged: biographies on actors ranging from Marlon Brando to Laurence Olivier, and Hindi dictionary gifted to him by his father (he stopped learning the language in Class IV when he went to boarding school).

His photographs are everywhere, always positioned below his father's, as if he needs constant reminding of the brand he belongs to: a third generation celebrity, as his father calls him. On a settee in the large den outside, there is a pile of Hindi Diamond comics he used to read as a child, below a half-finished painting of tall green grass in a cornflower yellow field ("probably the only painting my dad has ever made"), while on another there are artfully arranged coffee table books topped by one on cigars.

Ask him about smoking them, and he glares. "Actors live on a public platform. Let their private lives be their own. It's how they stay in touch with themselves and remain sane. I refuse to tell the world which pyjamas I sleep in or which side of the bed I lie on." It is the kind of objectification he will have to get used to given his current heartthrob status. It is also something which interferes with the careful crafting of his good son image, echoed by his wide circle of friends. His alleged liaisons—from Preity Zinta to Rani Mukherji—have acquired urban legend status even as the dumping by Kapoor helps keep the sympathy factor alive.

Friends speak as if by concert, but off the record, about how Kapoor tested his decency by repeatedly threatening to return his engagement ring, and how he told her one day that if she did it again he would keep it forever.

He did. But all this seems light years away from the cries of "Bunty, Bunty", as little boys trail him from the sets to his van. That may well be the key to Abhishek's long-term success—he is less the star and more the character, whether it be the wannabe tycoon, Rakesh from Fursatganj, in Bunty Aur Babli or Shankar Nagare, the tyro mafia boss in Sarkar.

He is the perfect vehicle for a new generation of filmmakers, whose only mantra is to keep pace with an audience in the superfast lane. This may explain why Abhishek's success came to him the minute he started to play the part rather than a simulacrum of a clean shaven '90s lover boy in transparent shirts and powder blue suits.

It was Ratnam, the minimalist director who encourages naturalism, who put him in a different league. His performance as Lallan, the angry hitman of Ratnam's Yuva, was the turning point. Abhishek still remembers the day Ratnam called him. "It was March 1, 2003. Ajay (Devgan) and I were shooting an action sequence for Zameen. He dropped me at the hotel. When Mani asked me if I would like to work for him—I thought it was a bit funny and a bit sublime—I never questioned it," says Abhishek. Ratnam wasn't the only one who was waking up to his propensity for intensity. Varma called him after watching Sooraj Barjatya's Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon and told him he had inspired him to make a love story, Naach. Even now, Abhishek looks incredulous.

It has not been easy for Abhishek. From his hyped debut in Refugee, the same year another star scion called Hrithik Roshan was unleashed, to the lowest points in his career—the eight-month-long delay in distributing Shararat and then the abject failure of his friend Apoorva Lakhia's Mumbai Se Aaya Mera Dost—he has always kept his dignity intact. But then he has had practice.

Tribulations are not new to the Bachchans. He still recalls going to the Breach Candy hospital every day when he was six to see his father in the ICU. "It was like one big game," he says. "Whenever we walked into the ICU, my dad would point to all the bottles and drips and say, 'Look I've got kites for you.' We were preoccupied with wearing masks and playing the doctor. It wasn't a time of sorrow or distress."

Life was uncomplicated: car pools to Bombay Scottish shared with friends whom he still retains—Aditya and Uday Chopra (Yash Chopra's sons), Goldie and Nanu Behl (producer Ramesh Behl's children), Hrithik and Sunaina Roshan (Rakesh Roshan's children), Jatin (villain Sujit Kumar's son), Amit and Sumit (sons of director Prakash Mehra) and Vinay (a friend who works for Bacardi). Johar, who lived at Malabar Hill then, would see him and his sister Shweta only once in awhile, usually at their joint birthday party. Johar reminisces, "We would have these dancing competitions in which Adi (Aditya) invariably came first. Amit uncle was the judge." They still meet. Often. Johar recalls the coffee he, Aditya and Abhishek had recently. "There we were, the three idiots who would go to fancy dress parties together, being so comfortable in the same space." Also, so successful.

Everything changed when Abhishek and his sister were packed off to Aiglon, a British international boarding school in Switzerland, when he was nine. This was after a year in Delhi, which he spent at Modern School, Vasant Vihar. So, was he upset? "No," he laughs, "I loved it. Shweta was there, so were my four cousins. My father always made it a point to let us know what was going on and how the family would deal with it. But being a child, you live in your own world." He always wanted to be an actor, an ambition fuelled by his habit of hanging out at his dad's film sets and finessed by his school drama coach, Desmond Haan. But as his father wanted him to get a formal education, he went to Boston University, where his sister was. After two years of liberal arts, he declared fine arts as his major and applied to various acting schools.

But then his sister got married, he returned to Mumbai taking a semester off to help, and then never went back. It wasn't easy to begin with. He remembers calling producers and directors, and asking for work. No one was rude ("I think they had too much respect for my father") but none of them wanted the "responsibility" of launching him. He was 20. He did some workshops with Roshan Taneja, his mother's drama coach, and Anupam Kher, and had fortunately picked up little skills like riding (on the sets of Mard), fighting (on every set) and filmmaking (while working for ABCL when Major Saab was being made). "I did everything. I made tea, delivered food, carried bags, drove artists to work, woke them up in the morning. I loved it. It taught me a lot. Till then I had thought the spot boy was someone who worked with the spotlight."

He waited for a year until it got to him, and then he called a friend, Rakeysh Mehra, who had directed his father in the BPL ads. They co-wrote a screenplay on India-Pakistan unity called ‘Samjhauta Express’ to be made into a small budget movie. It wasn't made, but another one-line concept about good vs evil got developed into Aks. Then J.P. Dutta decided to launch him in Aakhri Mogul, which was shelved for Refugee. The film was a disaster at the box office, and Abhishek had to return the advances that several producers had paid him, hoping it would succeed.

The process of trial and error began, with a series of no-hopers, from Tera Jadoo Chal Gaya to Haan Maine Bhi Pyaar Kiya. "It got to a point where the Friday of my release was like another one biting the dust," he grimaces. "You start doubting your capability and saying maybe this is the wrong profession for you," he says. But his parents always had faith. "They were just fantastic. My dad said, 'Just keep working.' He said it wouldn't give me time to think and sit at home to mope. Two, he said, you are in front of the camera improving every day. I just took on whatever work was given to me and did my best."

It is a faith the audiences are now reposing in him as he evolves a distinctive style to set him apart from his contemporaries and his legendary father. His mother, Jaya, thinks it is unusual for an actor in Hindi cinema not to look into the camera all the time. She should add the mirror too—Abhishek abhors cosmetics, mock threatening his make-up "dada" every time he comes near him.

He hates anyone touching his hair, though he did bring himself to changing the side-parting that he started out with. His stylist Falguni Thakore, a legacy of his relationship with Kapoor, caters to his fetish for shoes (Prada or Bally) and belts, and says, "His strength is that he is real. There is no effort to mould him into what he is not." His barber and tailor (for suits) have remained the same since he was a child. His father is the first person he calls whenever anything happens—his sister and mother are a joint second. They also buy his clothes which, though he is an adult, doesn't strike him as being odd.

Abhishek's references are international—he can recognise a Michael Bay movie as quickly as he can recall Colin Firth's filmography. He likes reading, and Lakhia says he has been given a couple of books with suggestions that he could turn them into movies, including an incomprehensible one on the Mossad. He watches his old movies every day in the trailer to see where he went wrong, keeping in mind his favourite piece of advice from his grandfather: "In life, it's not the number of times you fall down that matters. It's the number of times you pick yourself up and carry on that matters." Just as well that Abhishek already fits into his dad's size 44 shoes.

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