The strange case of Ayushmann Khurrana
In spite of a dream debut, Vicky Donor (2012), that catapulted him to the top league, being blessed with not just leading man good looks but also being a fine blend of talent that can not just act but also sing, Ayushmann Khurrana find himself in a strange place. In the last three years he has had an equal number of solo hero releases and while every film in that list meets the traditional check-list of all things right- top banner (YashRaj Films), interesting roles (Nautanki Saala) or enough pre-release buzz (Hawaizaada) and yet nothing seems to be working for him.
Khurrana is a rare exception of stars of today. He isn't a star son blessed with a packaged launch such as Varun Dhawan or Arjun Kapoor or someone who was handpicked by powers be like a Ranveer Singh or Siddharth Malhotra. Neither is he someone who came up the supporting actor route a la Manoj Bajpai or Aditya Roy Kapur nor is he a TV star who broke through to the other side like a Sushant Singh Rajput. Khurrana came to prominence when he won the second season of MTV Roadies and went on to become a popular radio jockey. Although he was fairly active in theatre during his college days, Khurrana opted to host television shows instead of becoming a professional actor. His pleasing demeanor and ease in front of the camera made him an instant hit with the not just the participants but the viewers as well.
Khurrana's effortlessness as he glided between hosting an MTV Roadies or India's Got Talent to a singing reality show, Music Ka Maha Muqqabla, or the dance-based Just Dance displayed signs of a budding all-round talent but it wasn't until Vicky Donor that the possibility became a reality. A box-office success with not just the audience but critics and trade pundits as well, Vicky Donor with its sperm donating rascal of a protagonist was a mainstream experimental film that struck gold across the spectrum. It also introduced Khurrana as an actor-star who could become the character and at the same time infuse much of his own effervescence into the character to such a degree that you didn't where one ended and the other began.
The true mark of success of an actor in popular Hindi cinema is that he/ she is accosted equally by both the big banners and the art or middle-of-the-path cinema and with Khurrana one could see both ends even fuse into one. The range that Ayushmann Khurrana can operate across could be gauged from the fact that he would perhaps be the only artist who managed to display versatility on the lines of a Kishore Kumar, and more importantly like the icon also showed that he had what it took to sustain over the years. As per the ways of commercial Hindi cinema there might have been a flurry Vicky Donoresque roles but Khurrana's next film, Nautanki Saala, was different from expectations. Khurrana played a smart-alecky actor whose seemingly happy existence disintegrates as he tries to set things right for suicidal man he saves. Directed by Rohan Sippy, Nautanki Saala didn't do well at the box-office but Khurrana was not only appreciated but also proved that Vicky Donor wasn't a fluke. Khurrana displayed good intentions with the immediate releases following his debut but in an industry that operates on strange principles good intentions rarely mean much.
The attention that Khurrana was showered with following Vicky Donor possibly made him the envy of many, as he was someone who… well, didn't follow the rules and also barely paid his dues. The failure of Nautanki Saala wasn't as much the film's failure as it was about the falling of Ayushmann Khurrana, which was evident from an awards show gag a few months later. Hosts Shah Rukh Khan and Shahid Kapoor played 'insiders' who mocked Khurrana, the 'outsider', for crashing their party and broke a (fake) bottle on Khurrana's head while telling him that his one smash hit didn't change his Johnny come lately status in their eyes. Although such gags are scripted and everyone's playing along, the choice of the words to refer to Khurrana as an outsider was barely inconspicuous. His third release Bewakoofiyaan (2014) was his first for Bollywood's biggest production house, YashRaj Films, and, besides being an unavoidable attempt to an almost rite-of-passage standard Hindi film romance, was a washout.
The response to Bewakoofiyaan was less enthusiastic than Nautanki Saala but a common critique of both the films was that they had all the ingredients but simply refused to take off. Unlike Vicky Donor both these films weren't able to make full use of Khurrana and give a sense that the actor was forced to fit into the character as opposed to the character benefitting from his presence. Such a thing is often reserved for stars but riding on Vicky Donor, Khurrana was worthy enough of being given that leeway. Yet Khurrana appears to be a second choice instead of being a natural headlining name. This highlights the outsider tag and distances him form the industry inner circle that loves to operate as a large family.
Khurrana is far more promising than a cabal of the so-called insiders and even his choice of films demonstrate his willingness to not play to the gallery. To attempt something as quirky as Hawaizaada (2015), it's abysmal box-office or critical response notwithstanding, reveals a lot about the actor and Khurrana has enough in him to deliver. What he needs is a script or a director willing to allow him to do what he does best and his next release, Dum Laga Ke Haisha (2015), love story between a 'vernacular-accented' man and his plus-sized wife set in small town India, could very well be it.