Ali Fazal doesn’t want to fit in anymore

Hunger. That’s the word I think of as I watch Ali Fazal at The Nod shoot in a Mumbai studio. It’s there in how he looks at the camera, like he wants to consume it, or be consumed by it. It’s there in the animation with which he expresses himself, all soft smiles offset by smouldering eyes—the kind of intensity you’d associate with a film performance. It’s even there when he steps back and analyses each shot—asking questions about the lighting, his posture, and whether he should tie his hair or tuck it behind his ears.

It’s 5 pm and he’s been at it all day. On set, he’s the only person who hasn’t had lunch, but there’s no hint of fatigue or boredom. At one point, he comes running out of the changing room like Archimedes having his Eureka moment—in this case, an idea for a new look. He shares it with a mix of boyish enthusiasm and total respect for the photographer’s opinion.  

In the middle of all this, his assistant hands him his ringing phone. Fazal doesn’t realise that the person at the other end is on speaker until his wife, actor-producer Richa Chadha, greets him with a term of endearment that echoes across the room. Everyone chuckles. He smiles sheepishly and quickly switches off the speaker, asking his wife about her day and their five-month-old daughter. Phone call done, he jumps right back into the shoot. He’s stretching his arms above his head, he’s standing on one leg, he’s crouching like a jungle cat ready to pounce, he wants to try it all. Again, that hunger.  

My observation is only reinforced when, after he’s finally done with the shoot, we settle down for a chat. Through the next hour, what comes through is his near-desperate need to tell good stories, to give back, and to (as he says more than once) “reflect our times”.  

He’s thrilled about the response to Girls Will Be Girls, the couple’s first outing as producers, which has won major awards at Sundance and MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. Director Shuchi Talati’s bildungsroman about a schoolgirl’s sexual awakening, now streaming on Prime Video, is a gentle, nostalgic look at adolescence, first love, and motherhood. It’s also a sharp critique of the sexism that is so deeply ingrained in our school system. We talk about a scene that will take many of us back to our co-ed school days. A teacher makes the girls stand on stools in class to demonstrate how easy it is for the boys to look up their skirts as they walk up the stairs. The lesson? Girls should wear longer skirts. No notes for the boys. “You know, our actor, Preeti Panigrahi, she’s from today’s generation. She’s just finished her studies, and she told us it’s still like this,” says Fazal, shaking his head in disgust.  

He’s also really looking forward to Rule Breakers, a film in which he’s acted with Iranian actor Nikohl Boosheri (The Bold Type) and English actor and screenwriter Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag), which is set to hit theatre screens on March 7. Based on the true story of the first Afghan all-female robotics team, it details how these young girls and women worked in secret and against all odds, defying the oppressive Taliban regime as well as the misogyny in their own homes. 

That’s two back-to-back movies about women, their lived experiences, and their empowerment. Most male actors and producers would shy away from even one such movie. But the feminist tag is one Fazal wears proudly, in an industry where most prefer the anodyne ‘humanist’. But then, he’s never quite fit the typical Bollywood mould.  

Despite his conventional good looks and acting chops, Fazal never made it as an A-list ‘hero’ in Hindi films. His first movie as the lead, a 2011 Shah Rukh Khan production called Always Kabhi Kabhi, sank without a trace. Before and after that, there were some scattered breakthroughs: a cameo in 2009’s biggest hit, 3 Idiots, and Fukrey in 2013, which has gained sleeper hit status over time. But they never got him the success he fantasised about. “It didn’t happen for me. Somehow, one film after another, it just didn’t happen.”

Before you could write him off, though, he started making a name for himself in global productions. There was Furious 7 (part of the Fast & Furious franchise) and Victoria & Abdul with Dame Judi Dench, with whom he also appeared in Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile, alongside Tom Bateman, Annette Bening, Russell Brand, and Gal Gadot. These films seemed more in keeping with his suave, urbane image and his education at elite institutions such as LaMartiniere Boys’ College in Lucknow, the Doon School in Dehradun, and St Xavier’s College in Mumbai. And just when you thought you could comfortably put him in that box, he switched gears again—and became a household name for his performance as Guddu Pandit, an unhinged gangster from the badlands of UP, in Prime Video’s gritty crime thriller series Mirzapur, now in its third season. 

Given how Bollywood loves to slot and typecast actors, it’s not surprising that Fazal is a bit of a misfit. Does it bother him? “It used to. So much. I wanted to fit in, to be part of something, I wanted everybody in the industry to know me and my work. I wanted to have the right launch, do the right films. And I did keep getting films, you know? Something here, something there...but they didn’t really work. It was only after I started doing films outside India that I realised the world is really big, and I don’t want to fit in anymore.”  

The sheer variety of projects he’s got lined up for 2025 is validation enough, although he has no need for it. Apart from Rule Breakers, Fazal will also be seen in Lahore 1947 (a Rajkumar Santoshi film also starring Aamir Khan), Anurag Basu’s ensemble film Metro In Dino, Mani Ratnam’s Thug Life, and Raj and DK’s Netflix fantasy-action drama Rakt Bramhand. There’s also a film version of Mirzapur in the works.  

And that’s just as an actor. With Pushing Buttons Studios, the production company he co-founded with his wife, he is keen to support stories that come from different perspectives. “We want to get the gaze right. It’s always been the victors who write the histories, the books, the religions, and in today’s times, the movies, too. We have to tell stories that reflect the times more equally, so it’s important to see who’s telling the story, who’s written it, who’s produced it, who’s photographed it.” 

That was also the impetus behind Undercurrent, the programme he and Chadha set up to train women in male-dominated technical aspects of filmmaking, such as lighting. When production on Girls Will Be Girls was kicking off, the duo wanted the heads of all departments to be women. But one for which they couldn’t find anyone was gaffing, because lighting, with its heavy equipment, has always been seen as a man’s domain. “There were almost no women gaffers in India! So our co-producer Tanya [Negi] said, ‘Why not create a programme?’ We worked on this idea, got a grant from Berlinale, and enrolled 12 women in the first edition,” says Fazal. “Two of them landed up on my Mirzapur set. One was on the Girls set. All of them are employed somewhere or the other. And we’re looking to start the second edition soon.” 

It’s an almost poetic paradox: here is someone with such a strong sense of right and wrong, a clear idea of cinema’s, and his own, purpose, yet his most famous character is Mirzapur’s manically violent, morally complicated Guddu Pandit. From seeking revenge and justice to simply going power-mad, Pandit’s arc has changed drastically in the last six years. I tell Fazal that there are Reddit threads devoted to discussing whether there is any hope of redemption for Pandit. “None,” he says thoughtfully. “The only conclusion for him is losing his mind. By the end of Season 3, you see him blank, almost hallucinating. I feel sorry for him.” 

Lately, there’s been an uptick in talk about movies and shows that glorify violence, misogyny, and toxic behaviour. Where does Mirzapur fit in with Fazal’s own sense of what cinema should say? He thinks hard and answers slowly, almost as if he’s working it out for himself as we chat. “At the crux of it, now that I look back, it comes from daddy issues. If you remove the specifics of the gang wars and violence, it’s all, you know, brothers fighting, the same family dynamics that our society is going through. All these gangsters are basically just very, very unloved men.” There have also been times he has turned down roles because he felt they were just ethically wrong and impossible for him to justify doing. “To begin with, they were just badly written scripts. There are toxic scripts and there are propaganda scripts—these are two big ones that run the show in today’s times. And we don’t talk enough about propaganda scripts because everyone is scared of the repercussions. So when films like Kabir Singh and Animal come up, it’s probably a lot of that bhadaas coming in here as well.”  

Which is not to say that there aren’t amazing Indian films, he says, including many that have made an impact globally, especially in recent times. But he wants to see more. “I vote every year as a member of AMPAS (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) in LA, and I get to see all these beautiful projects—my first reaction is to see ki iss mein Indian filmein kitni hain? I want to champion those. I want to take South Asian stories across the globe. Because there is a demand [for our stories]. Just look at All We Imagine As Light! I mean, it’s historic. And come on man, it should have been, it should have been…” His disappointment that Payal Kapadia’s film was not selected as India’s official entry for the Oscars is palpable. 

Over the years, I’ve interviewed a lot of actors who talk about wanting to do good work. They usually mean films with big-ticket directors or meaty roles. Fazal also wants that for himself. But what strikes me is his desire to go beyond that and do something for cinema, to leave it better than he found it. “I just…I really want to make good stories, be part of them. I feel for cinema,” he says earnestly, urgently. “I don’t mean we have to only make sad films or ‘festival’ films, I mean comedy, action, whatever genre. Whatever story I make right now, it is recorded history in those cans, and nobody can change that. Look, 50 years later, there will be a generation that will look at the stories we told. And if they don’t see our times reflected in our stories, they will fucking spit on us.”  

For someone so determined to do things, I wonder: what does he do to actually stay creative? “I read,” he says, pulling out Elif Shafak’s latest book, There Are Rivers In The Sky, from his backpack. “The real riyaaz I like to do is just be with myself. And reading is important for an actor. Any and all education, really. I also give a lot of credit to Adishakti, Veenapani Chawla’s theatre lab in Puducherry. It teaches a very different style of physical acting. I’ve done a few workshops there and I’m on the board now. But I don’t think I’ve learnt enough. I want to keep learning more.” Again, that hunger.

Editorial Direction: Megha Mahindru, Ridhima Sapre. Art and Creative Director: Harry Iyer. Makeup: Sandeep. Hair: Irfan. Fashion assistant: Stuti, Asu, Nandini. Production: By The Gram.