Abhishek Bachchan admits he’s not in the creative frame of mind that he was in five years ago. Back then, he wanted to do roles which were more intimate and low-key. That resulted in him headlining Shoojit Sircar’s I Want To Talk last year, based on the real-life story of a cancer survivor. He also starred in Remo D’Souza’s slice-of-life film Be Happy, in which he plays the father of a girl who wants to be a dancer.
But now, Abhishek admits in an interview with SCREEN that he’s gearing up to embrace vanity yet again by returning to the commercial space. His recent whodunit comedy Housefull 5 emerged as a hit at the box office, and he’s now gearing up for even more projects in the mainstream space, after the release of his next, Madhmita’s Kaalidas Laapata, which drops on ZEE5 on July 4.
When you started out in the early 2000s, vanity was a big thing. How have you distanced yourself from it now?
It wasn’t a big thing, it was one of the main things. Your body, how you looked, your makeup, your clothes, it was very, very important. But that’s still the case. It’s an audio-visual medium. With time and experience, you start empowering yourself and becoming more confident to do without that armour. It’s basically crutches and armour. You’re also then able to attempt different kinds of stuff. Weirdly, I shot Kaalidar Laapata before I Want To Talk. All these films came to me at a very interesting phase in my life when I wanted to delve into something far more creative, personal, which had depth of character.
I was in that mood. I wanted to do stuff that’s quieter and more intimate. So I did a couple of films like that and I thoroughly enjoyed them. With experience, you learn to say, “Okay, I don’t need to look like this to be a protagonist.” We expect so much from our actors today that we forget they’re also artistes. They may or may not want to do something at a point of time. Currently, I’m in a different mindset altogether. Right now, I’m looking forward to getting back in the commercial space and doing the song and dance and the action.
Yes, you recently delivered a hit in Housefull 5. And you are also doing Riteish Deshmukh’s period drama Raja Shivaji. What has caused this return to commercial cinema?
Creative people go through cycles. Just around 2020, as Covid happened and soon after that, everybody was in a particular frame of mind. Things were a lot slower because we were just sitting around at home for months. So the pace of life also became that. I also felt a lot more settled so I thought this is the kind of zone I want to be in. Now, I’m satiated and saturated. In fact, the last out-and-out commercial film I did before Housefull 5 was actually Housefull 3 in 2015, 10 years ago.
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Finally, you’ve been working a lot with child actors, from Inayat Verma in Ludo (2020) and Be Happy (2025) to most recently, Daivik Baghela in Kaalidhar Laapata. Is there something you learn as an actor working with them?
Daivik was brilliant! He’s from Bhopal, so we had that connect. My nanihal is in Bhopal. He does a lot of theatre with his father. He was very well-prepared. At that age, you don’t expect them to be prepared. You expect to handle them. But he knew the scenes and dialogues. He was also very open to direction by Madhumita. She’s a very particular director. Her attention to emotional detail is wonderful. She knows exactly the emotion she wants. For a young actor like Daivik to remember and execute that was brilliant. I hope you get to meet him. He’s a firecracker and a lot of fun to be around.
