"Shah Rukh Khan has proved his range as an actor with right opportunities,"Kunal Kohli

He’s a fallen hero who failed to save India’s fortunes in the finals of a crucial hockey tournament. To retrieve his lost glory, he takes on a women’s hockey team and leads them to win a global championship. Meet Shah Rukh Khan the actor, not the star.

In a new age Bollywood, when star actors choose to steal the show with offbeat roles, Khan somehow ended up restricting himself to mushy glamorous romances, thanks to buddy Karan Johar’s money-minting movies (mostly at the overseas box office). However, with Chak De India, everyone’s talking about Khan’s versatility. The king of bubblegum films let’s his histrionics take over for a change.

“His range as an actor is huge; he is someone who has performed street theatre,” says the film’s director Shimit Amin.

“It’s unfortunate that Shah Rukh’s true acting potential has not been tapped properly. It is filmmakers like us who don’t offer him challenging scripts. He has proved his range as an actor with right opportunities,” says director Kunal Kohli.

Khan, who shot to stardom with Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman, Deewana and Baazigar in the early ’90s, emerged as the most popular actor in the NRI market with Johar’s glossy romantic drama archetype.

“Our cinema is becoming bolder and Shah Rukh is supporting it,” says Ritesh Sidhwani, producer of Don. “In Don, he broke his romantic image to play the ‘cool’ villain.”

“In most of his films, Shah Rukh Khan’s overwhelming image surpasses the characters he enacts, something that has not happened in Chak De,” says Anupama Chopra, author of King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema.

“We associate him with these romantic films because they were hits.”

Unfortunately, films like Swades and to some extent, Paheli, where Khan tried to move away from the stereotype, failed to make a mark at the BO. In this context, the commercial success of Chak De is all the more important. “It’s common in our industry that when a ‘different’ film becomes successful, more filmmakers are encouraged to experiment,” says Honey Irani, script and storywriter of Darr, one of the films that made Khan popular as an anti-hero in the early ’90s.

In the mid ’90s, when Khan had become typecast as the passionate anti-hero with hits like Baazigar and Darr, he went on to redefine his image (after offering duds like Anjaam, based on the same theme) as the romantic Raj and Rahul with the record-breaking Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, and consequently Johar’s Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

This November, Khan will be back again as a larger-than-life hero in Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om, but there are concerted efforts at moving away from the glam. He will reportedly play a Muslim protagonist in Johar’s forthcoming My Name is Khan (working title), which unlike the latter’s regular fares, is said to deal with terrorism and being a Muslim in post 9/11 New York. He is also supposedly featuring in Rajkumar Hirani’s next, loosely based on Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone.

Source: NewIndPress