Shah Rukh Khan: Sexy, Witty and Unstoppable at 50 says Vogue India

Vogue India: Nobody knows how Shah Rukh Khan does what he does – he doesn’t either. The rise and rise of “India’s biggest movie star” is marked by chance, celestial design and a whole lot of charm. But as the actor turns 50 this November, he’s still on the lookout for the role of his career

“I want to be Batman,” says Shah Rukh Khan.

We’re in his version of the Batmobile. His swish black and chrome trailer, parked outside a warehouse-like studio in the sprawling compound of Hyderabad’s Ramoji Film City, is kitted with much luxury. He sits on a reclining leather chair as a team of two men paints his armour on his face. For tonight, Ramoji is Gotham City.

“If I wanted to wake up as myself every morning, I wouldn’t be an actor. I want to be Batman in the morning. I want to be Superman. I want to be Raj, Rahul, the guy in the blood-spattered white vest with a gun in his hand and a girl by his side,” says Khan. His dream role, he tells me in the month that the 24th Bond film hits theatres, is to play James Bond. (Favourite Bond movie? Moonraker.) It’s a myth that actors are narcissistic, he declares. His only envy in the world are people who are comfortable with themselves. “For 25 years I’ve wanted to be 70 different people in the morning. I don’t want to be me. So if I loved myself so much, why would I be an actor?”

Khan turns 50 on November 2. He’s been in the movies for precisely half of his life, working around the clock, famously subsisting on a diet rich in nicotine, good spirits and astonishingly little sleep.

He is in Ramoji to finish the last leg of shooting for Dilwale, a movie directed by Rohit Shetty and produced by Khan’s company, Red Chillies Entertainment. Scheduled for a December release, it marks his big romantic comeback with Kajol—the title is a throwback to their winning pairing in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) in 1995, the movie that for all purposes turned Shah Rukh Khan, the actor, into Shah Rukh, India’s biggest movie star. It is to accommodate his relentless schedule that the Vogue team—and a Victoria’s Secret supermodel, Shanina Shaik—have flown down to make pictures between 9pm and 3am.

Khan the Actor might not love himself enough, but Khan the Star is a picture of grand self-love. He says things like: “I’m an international &^**%$ movie star.” Both men are in the trailer right now. It’s no wonder that Mahesh Bhatt, a prescient man, had said back in the ’90s that Khan is schizophrenic—“a man with two people lurking inside.”

It was the actor who had responded with a self-effacing “Why me?” when the British-Indian filmmaker and journalist Nasreen Munni Kabir had pitched the idea of a documentary on his life for Channel 4. But Khan, the movie star, isn’t averse to beating up people who spawn gossip about imagined infidelities or breach the common code of decency. “The excuse that I’m a public figure and you can say anything about me is bullshit. I’m very respectful of people. Tehzeeb cheez hoti hai. If I met your mother, I’d be respectful to her even if I hated you,” he says.

There is, in fact, a lot of talk of “tehzeeb,” the Urdu word that roughly approximates to “refined manners” or “etiquette.” It is a word that doesn’t translate well. Neither does Khan. Karan Johar, his longtime friend and collaborator, phrases it best: “You can’t explain Shah Rukh Khan. You can only experience him.”

Many of us in this cinema-crazed nation of billions must have had a Shah Rukh Khan experience to make him the star that he is. Perhaps it was watching him use his physicality—the dimpled smile, the limpid eyes washed with thirst—to his best advantage onscreen. In DDLJ, in the song ‘Ruk Jaa O Dil Deewane’, Khan’s character, Raj, has a few false starts on the piano before he sings out in perfect melody. And the contemptuous lady in question is swept off her feet. That’s Shah Rukh Khan all right. Making us lose our footing when we least expect it. My sweep was when I heard him read from his work-in-progress book at the ThiNK Fest in Goa in November 2012. When he read an extract about his adolescent pain of watching his father fail, and die without pride or purse, I found myself weeping.

Adoration finds him everywhere. Women show up to tie ‘I love you’ bracelets, sometimes rakhis, on his wrists. They hand him letters and notes. Internationally, the hordes of fans have multiplied over the years. Nations have followed suit: the French have awarded him their highest civilian honour, the Légion d’honneur. “Publicly, I’m fantastically confident but sometimes I get weirded out by all the attention,” he says. “I can’t disrespect the fact that there are these people out there… not just the screaming, selfie-loving fans, but people who seem to truly love me. I can see it when the aunties come and the mothers come and the children come. They hug me, and sometimes they start crying. I don’t know which is which… so I make it a point to meet everybody with a lot of love.”

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