Vicky Kaushal: We see a star every week who trends and then nobody remembers

Vicky Kaushal

Actor Vicky Kaushal has time and again proven his versatility with his craft. Whether it is 'Uri' or 'Sardar Udham Singh' or his latest release 'Sam Bahadur', Vicky has impressed audiences with his talent. While he is one of the most well-known faces of Indian cinema, Vicky does not like to label himself as a star. "I'll tell you very frankly: Stardom is defined by the number of people who come to watch your film on day one, in a theatre - without being dependent on how good the trailer was, how fantastic the songs were, or how cool the poster was. They come to watch you. Irrespective of everything else. That's the true definition of stardom. And honestly, that hasn't happened to me yet. I still need to achieve that. I am not there yet," he said in an interview with GQ.

We live in an era where actors are accessible and their public image is often quite narrative. With constant exposure through social media and paparazzi culture, celebrities get to present a version of themselves to their audience while playing on the relatability factor. "I think the idea of classic stardom will be replaced by a different version. The kind of popularity that Dilip Kumar, Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan must have seen is as different from what Shah Rukh Khan has experienced. It's still huge but a different manifestation of the same glory. The last person I felt this way about was Hrithik Roshan. It was a phenomenon that hit everybody. Right now, there's confusion among the younger lot. Because we see a star every week who trends and then nobody remembers them a few weeks later. For this generation, it will be much harder to attain the stardom of the past," Vicky elaborated.

It is also the oversaturation of celebrity culture that has kept the 'The Great Indian Family' actor away from reading about himself on the internet. of reading too much of what's written about him. He said that barring film reviews, he rarely reads anything written about him as he feels it takes away the joy of acting.

"Acting is the best profession in the world. But I could never articulate in words why it's so thrilling to be an actor, " he said further quoting Cillian Murphy on the same. "He said, subconsciously, acting helps you cultivate empathy because the definition of empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes, which you do 12 hours a day when you play a character. So after [a wrap], while the character has left you and you're back to being yourself, you cannot forget what the character has left behind. They have made you step out of your own experience and empathize with someone else. So in your personal life, it becomes so much easier to cancel yourself out and see stuff from someone else's perspective."