It is a burning high summer in the Swiss lakeside town of Locarno and the Indian movie star Shah Rukh Khan is flying in: the king, the emperor, the Baadshah of the movies, the man whose fanbase-headcount makes him one of the world’s biggest stars.
Starting as the Bollywood bad guy in early 90s films such as Darr and Baazigar, Khan made a sensational breakthrough in 1995 as a puppyish romcom lead in Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (The Brave-Hearted Will Take the Bride). From here, he became a Bollywood superstar in all manner of genres: musicals, melodramas, thrillers and comedies, including the 2001 family saga Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness), the romantic drama Devdas and the action spectacular Jawan. Shah Rukh Khan is his own genre. Now, having taken a break during Covid to recharge his batteries and nurture his mojo, he has returned to acting and, at 58, is receiving the Locarno film festival’s Pardo lifetime achievement award – and giving his first interview in two years.
Khan is fit and toned, quietly spoken and relaxed, his unmistakable leonine presence a little occluded by dark glasses. Before we start, he unselfconsciously submits to his team as they fuss around him, checking his clothes, moisturising his skin a little, spraying his luxuriant hair, for all the world as if this is a TV appearance. This is the second time I have seen him in the flesh. The first was when I was one of a crowd in Mumbai, where Khan has a home and sometimes playfully appears on the balcony to salute his fans. That day, the fans went wild.
I ask Khan if he enjoys awards ceremonies. “Yes,” he says, beaming. “I enjoy it. I am very shameless about this! I love getting awards. I love the ceremony. I get a little nervous if I have to give speeches. Especially with international awards, because then I need to make sure Indian cinema is presented well. I have to be on my best behaviour. I have to control my sense of humour. Because cinema for India is such an important thing.” I ask if he has a trophy cabinet and his eyes gleam: “I do. It’s bigger than this room! I have 300 awards. I have a nine-storey office and on every floor I have some of the awards. Actually, it’s not a trophy room. It’s a library which is designed like an English library.”
It is when I begin to ask about the day-to-day life of a hard-working Indian movie star that my inevitable simpering begins and I start telling him it isn’t the first time I’ve seen him. “Waving from my house?” he interrupts with a smile. Sheepishly, I nod. Khan smiles and inclines his head a little, as if to accept the tribute. Then it’s back to the day job. “When I’m given any role, comedic, bad guy, good guy, lover, I get very nervous. Will I be able to deliver? Am I getting it right? Is the comic timing right? Am I being mean enough? Have I got the voice right? I love doing roles where I could be mean, but I have a heart of gold. I’m not given too many roles like that. They’re normally roles where I am loving to women.”
In Jawan, he relished the role of the action hero. Might he, like Tom Cruise, just go fully into action? Khan’s answer takes in his recent break from the public glare. “When I came into the industry I was an athlete. My life’s dream was to have a six-pack, wear a white vest, have a lady with my arm around her, blood on my face and a gun in my hand. My dream was to enter a room, someone says: ‘Who are you?’ and I shoot them.
“At the age of 55, I took a kind of sabbatical. During the pandemic there was nothing else to do and I was telling everyone: learn Italian cooking and work out. I was working out. I built a body. After four years, people started missing me because before that I was too much in everybody’s face.” For a moment, he is thoughtful. “People said: ‘Will you do a film?’ I said: ‘Only if it’s an action film!’”
Khan’s daily regimen isn’t what you might expect. He generally eats only one meal – a personal choice that has nothing to do with intermittent fasting – and hits the gym for just half an hour a day. “I go to sleep at five in the morning. When Mark Wahlberg gets up, I go off to sleep. And then I wake up about nine or 10 if I’m shooting. But then I will come home at 2am, take a bath and then work out before I go to sleep.”
We come to my favourite of his films: the daringly personal doppelganger drama Fan, from 2016, in which Khan plays a film star clearly based on himself, and also, in facial prosthetics, a sinister stalker-fan who obsessively identifies with him and wants to kill him. Khan becomes animated at the mention of Fan, a rare box-office underperformer. “Nobody liked Fan!” he complains. “There are three or four films which are close to my heart, because they didn’t do well. Fan is one of them.”
He tells me about what the film means to him. “I come from a very ordinary lower-middle-class background. But now I am the star, I am the ‘king’.” (He makes a self-deprecating air quote gesture.) “But I am a very simple person at heart. That guy you saw waving to people … that’s not me.” He leans forward: “I’ve not done an interview for two years now. I would like to break your heart and tell you … if you think you are interviewing that star, he’s not here. You got the wrong Shah Rukh.”
I ask him about the future of Bollywood and put to him my theory that it is potent because it carries on with something Hollywood abandoned: the musical. He says: “Indian cinema like a cabaret: music, comedy, drama, a mishmash, it might be dancing, people falling down. I do believe it’s a more difficult art form. It doesn’t isolate film into comedy, romance, horror, musicals. It tells the whole story.” The current anxiety about people deserting movie-going for streaming TV, is, he says, just a “settling” period, like the invention of VCR. But Bollywood will be at the forefront of the new wave of cinema-going.
With my time just about up, Khan leaves me with his key insight: “Emotions are the darkness that surround you in the theatre!” And with this elegant phrase, accompanied by a beaming smile, the interview is concluded. I am ushered away and the retinue descends once again on this complicated and charming man.