newsletter issue 300

For Adarsh Gourav—the BAFTA-nominated actor who had the dream debut of playing a younger Shah Rukh Khan in ‘My Name is Khan’ (2010) and has, in the last 15 years, worked with bucket-list filmmakers like Zoya Akhtar, Bejoy Nambiar, Ramin Bahrani, and Arjun Varain Singh—music has always been his first love. It’s a love seeded in his childhood, one that has stuck despite often being unrequited, through rejection, failure, and harsh realisations. It has been his Everest, and it has given him everything he has today; he would likely not be on screen if it weren’t for being “noticed” while singing ‘Vande Mataram’ at the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival as a teenager, which really put him on the path to auditioning for films.

“I’ve always wanted to make music. I wanted to be a playback singer,” he says now, relaying a parallel life story that’s stayed under wraps until very recently. “And now I’m just using my street cred as an actor to push this side of myself. And why not? I hope they’ll think: ‘Acting achhi kar leta hai toh ye bhi theek thaak kar hi leta hoga.’” Read the polymath's interview about his role prep, and the lessons he picked up from Mumbai’s rising hip hop artists—from Shaikhspeare to Naezy.