The titular character in Hansal Mehta’s Faraaz (2023) doesn’t truly show up on screen till the final 20 minutes of its efficient 112-minute runtime. In an industry where grandstanding is the norm, this was a brave choice—especially for an actor, who is trying to prove his mettle in his first film. Zahan Kapoor, grandson of Shashi Kapoor, didn’t quite get the launch like some of his cousins did. He lurked on our screens. What truly surprised me about Mehta’s film is the manner in which he depicts a young boy’s coming-of-age, boiling it down to a choice. At a time when the youth are being misled in all directions, it was refreshing to see someone reflect the idealism of youth—making it aspirational without appearing inorganic. “Only after going through the filming process did I understand it was all building up to this very undervalued conviction—it’s not the flashy thing,” says Kapoor in a video call with Outlook.
Zahan Kapoor’s phone hasn’t stopped ringing in the last three months, since the release of Black Warrant (2025), where he played Sunil Kumar Gupta, one of the jailers of Tihar in the early 1980s. After the muted response that Kapoor got for his debut film, it was Vikramaditya Motwane’s show that proved to be ‘star-making’ as per industry parlance. The show makes spectacular use of Kapoor’s diminutive frame to tell an underdog story. Kapoor showed his flourishes as an actor too, navigating the difficult path of invoking a consistent 1980s English dialect, in the way he says “Maine Laa ki padhayi ki hai” (I’ve studied Law). It’s the kind of confident, high-wire act that one rarely sees from a young actor in contemporary Bollywood.
Not someone who fits the generic mould of the Bollywood ‘hero’, Kapoor has been deliberating over his next move for nearly a year now. He’s anxious about making the ‘right’ choice in the follow-up to all the appreciation. He realises how rare such unanimous praise is. So, he’s trying to savour it, while also cautiously bracing himself for when the bouquets will stop.
Talking about his decade-long gestating period before his Bollywood debut and what it taught him about patience, his aversion to ‘manufactured relevance’, and how he’s mindful about the privileged position he’s in, Kapoor reveals his myriad reflections.
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