This is Saif Ali Khan’s 28th year in the Hindi film industry. Like most others from his generation, he’s spent more of his life on the screen than off it. Unlike the other Khans, though, Saif’s has been a career that has consistently straddled the fragile bridge between actor and star. In the 1990s, it was out of limitation. Post the noughties, it’s been out of choice. Indian audiences have been unfamiliar with this terrain – for the most part, it translated to “neither here nor there” and “no man’s land”. But over the last decade, as incoming artists have begun to straddle the two extremes, and as moviegoers have begun to look past the big screen, Khan’s status has been reinterpreted as “all-rounder”. The specialists are now the ones struggling. Saif meanwhile headlines a film, a web series, does cameos, morphs into a supporting actor at will, thrives as an antagonist as well as a canny producer.
While the best of today’s artists are inherent actors flirting with the allowances of stardom, Khan’s arc – of a star aspiring to flirt with the obsessions of performance art – is a rarity. The risks he takes are calculated, often designed to be a zero-sum game. For instance, his last three roles alone have evoked the essence of three separate schools of Indian acting: Laal Kaptaan was an ‘arthouse’ performance, Tanhaji a single-screen one and Jawaani Jaaneman a multiplex turn The glass-half-empty perception of him has finally dissolved into a half-full one, partly due to the new-age casting revolution and partly due to his disarming desire to improve, adapt, evolve and experiment.
Saif Ali Khan is not perfect, he never has been, and maybe his imperfection has been his most enduring strength. He’s 50 now, but one might count on the fact that his skills will age with the kind of self-awareness missing from his high-profile contemporaries.
On that note, in the run-up to his second major OTT outing (the Amazon Original Tandav), here are 10 of his most remarkable performances across mediums, ranked:
10. Love Aaj Kal (2009)
The best thing about an otherwise-middling Love Aaj Kal was Saif Ali Khan in a double role. The casting felt a little gimmicky, but it wasn’t random. The duality on the surface is obvious: the ‘modern’ Jai is a classic Imtiaz Ali hero unsure of whether he’s coming or going, the old-school Veer is a romantic at odds with the existentialism of millennial feelings. But beneath it was another duality: Saif the star jostling for space with Saif the actor. On the back of a game-changing Omkara, which was still ripe in public memory, this was a reinvented Khan unveiling his new identity by juxtaposing it with an old one. The sturdy Sikh lover of post-Partition India – a flashback of none other than Rishi Kapoor’s story – was a far cry from the bronze-bodied metrosexual solo hero that Khan had come to symbolize. And the confused NRI of post-liberalization India became a messy monochromatic frame in a career that was until then bursting with pastel colours.
9. Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003)
The role of Rohit Patel was designed to be overshadowed by Shah Rukh Khan’s Aman and Preity Zinta’s Naina. It also came at a time Saif Ali Khan was starting to get typecast as the third-wheeling martyr of love triangles. But his Rohit – the friendzoned G-U-J-J-U bachelor living the colour-coded Manhattan life – was a breath of fresh air in a film that overdosed on terminal melodrama. His high-school-jock chemistry with SRK felt unscripted and on-the-fly, only a few seasons after he propped up the other Khan in a landscape-altering buddy flick. I remember this bromance going mainstream; I watched my first (and last) Filmfare Awards live in 2003, when the two Khans had a blast co-hosting the event in the lead-up to their Kal Ho Naa Ho renaissance. They were soon everywhere, not least because Saif had just broken through in the Hindi rom-com space – not as the boyish blue-blooded star-child with flowing locks, but as the rugged 30-something man-child finding resonance with a new multiplex generation of moviegoers.
8. Sacred Games (2018-19)
Playing a righteous, uninteresting police officer – who is destined to be hustled by both the villain and the elaborate non-linear narrative – can be a thankless job. But with his first “long-form” turn as the now-iconic Sartaj Singh, Khan became the first mainstream Hindi star to exercise his OTT muscles, thus paving the path for his colleagues. I’m not a fan of the series – the second season was a hot mess, the first fatally incomplete – but it’s hard to look past Khan’s ubiquitous, noble performance. He blends into his sweaty Mumbai surroundings, grounding a complex premise that threatens to spiral out of control every other minute. Though a number of actors over the years have played Sikh characters with varying degrees of success, Khan makes up in brooding action for what he lacks in language and lived-in experience. Pensive Khan is rarely as joyous as Goofy Khan, but the integrity of this effort is interesting to watch. Singh is nothing if not a symbol of Khan’s rare ‘middle’ privilege – the epitome of a Bollywood actor whose star is small enough to dare and fail, and big enough to dare and return. Neither a sensation, nor a cautionary tale, Khan thrives in this space of niche fame.
7. Agent Vinod (2012)
Everyone tries to forget this film – not least the star and the director himself – but the bloated, doomed, muddled, over-budget, globe-trotting and ambitious super-spy action thriller shone light on a single fact through its rubble: Saif Ali Khan is a terrifically understated action hero. The movie bombed big-time, as did Phantom later, but there’s something compelling about Saif as the suave, self-important and mysterious double agent. Sure, he’s Hollywood-ish in his appeal as compared to the desi Tiger (both movie and star) franchise. But he aces the musicality of moviemaking – from the haunting single-take blood ballad Raabta to the token publicity video Pyaar Ki Pungi – in a way that very few Indian son-of-soil heroes can. This is also a rare role where Khan, perhaps a performer who has the most fun while acting (he looks perpetually amused with his characters), is required to take himself seriously – but he manages to make serious look like fun too. I still revisit the more watchable parts of Agent Vinod for his charismatic little leaps of faith. It’s the closest cinema has come to a brown Bond.
6. Parineeta (2005)
Of all the first-tier actors in the noughties, I could have never placed Saif Ali Khan as Shekhar Roy in Vidya Balan’s celebrated debut film. Part Devdas and part Akshaye Khanna of Taal in Pradeep Sarkar’s elegant Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay adaptation, Khan plays an unusually passionate character – a musician-cum-jealous-lover at emotional odds with the literary nature of his setting. For once, he was on the right side of a triangle, lending valuable contrast to Balan’s lyrical performance and stealing the show by refusing to steal it. For a mercurial hero, his was also a surprisingly understated portrait of volatility. You believed his affection, his fondness, his love and misguided rage for Balan’s Lalita. I believe it was also the first time Khan used his inherently aristocratic voice to great effect, especially in Shekhar’s moments with his domineering father. His role was versatile within itself; it spoke volumes about his presence that a non-Bhansali period romance with none of the ornamental frills impressed a moviegoing culture conditioned to (the promise of) grandeur.
5. Kaalakaandi (2018)
Akshat Verma’s directorial debut and long-awaited follow-up to Delhi Belly tried too hard to be morbidly nutty. Yet Saif Ali Khan’s left-of-field conviction was on full display as an existential everyman who, on being diagnosed with stomach cancer, decides to “live it up” in an absurd night of drugs, parties, chases and fleeting connections. The black comedy is technically a multi-narrative film, but Khan’s oddly endearing and uninhibited performance blurs the line between middle-aged meltdown and coming-of-age flight. The terminal-hero-getting-high template is not unfamiliar. At some level, it’s often up to the actor to infuse these genre explosions with their own personality: Khan does plenty of it, somehow even raising visions of his own health scare and creative renaissance that followed. Give me this colourful on-screen crisis anyday over the bronzed, unidimensional and pretty-boy rom-com lead (Hum Tum, Salaam Namaste, Cocktail etc).