Tiger Shroff: Mass Hero, Meme Icon and the Curious Making of Modern Stardom
From being memed to becoming the face of Hindi cinema’s most enduring action franchise of his generation, Tiger Shroff has built a fandom from scratch. But as 'Baaghi 4 looms, can he turn intermittent stardom into something lasting?
When Tiger Shroff arrived on the big screen, with Heropanti (2014) people did not know what to make of him—an exquisitely agile body, every muscle and ab toiled for and controlled, bones as though jelly, doing splits with the ease of a skip, but a hairless face, pink lips, and soft hair that did not exude conventional, grunting masculinity. The punch-line of these off-colour jokes was that he looked like Kareena Kapoor Khan. How does one reconcile his movement with his face, his physicality with his presence?
But a ground-up fandom was being shaped in tier 2 and tier 3 cities, among an audience that was evading mainstream Hindi cinema’s urban gaze. “Tiger Shroff has built his stardom from scratch. Few actors of this generation have this kind of pull in with single screens,” film exhibitor and distributor Akshaye Rathi tells The Hollywood Reporter India.
The urban audience, Rathi notes, are “disloyal when it comes to recreation. A bad review can destroy a multiplex film. Compared to that single screen, massy films are review proof. This is the audience that Tiger Shroff has cultivated.”
Melanie Easton, an Australian filmmaker currently pursuing a PhD in Film Studies at the University of Queensland—also, a Tiger Shroff fan—was folded into this fandom after watching War (2019).
“He looks like he wants to be in the movies and he is having a great time. Things that other actors are using stunt doubles and CGI for, he is out there physically bleeding on set to get these outrageous shots. I admire this even when the film itself is not that great,” Easton notes.
Shroff’s career, while entirely anchored to his acrobatic ability, has been sporadically successful. “He has an intrinsic capability to do ballistic business. But the sense is that action in his films got repetitive and business stagnated,” Rathi notes.
After War and Baaghi 3 (2020), whose commercial success was undercut by the looming pandemic, Shroff had a spate of indefensible flops—Heropanti 2, Ganapath, Bade Miyan Chote Miyan, and a special appearance in Singham Again. When Baaghi 4 was announced, a fan wrote a concerned note on Twitter. Shroff responded, “Dont worry ill make you proud again (sic)”.
The relationship of fandom to star-making is curious, for they feed on each other. Shroff’s movies brought in not just the single-screen audience—mostly men, with films like Baaghi (2016), which has since spawned its own franchise of increasing violence with Shroff’s decreasing length of hair, with Baaghi 4 now perched to release.
His fandom also included young girls and kids—whom he fed with films like A Flying Jatt (2016), Munna Michael (2017), neither of which did well, and Student Of The Year 2 (2019), a moderate success.
The tilt of Baaghi 4, from the promotional material, is one towards an excess of violence—the flavour of the season post Animal (2023). “Baaghi 4 seems to be a shift and amplification towards the mass audience who has patronised him,” Rathi notes. The film has received an A certificate (Adults only) from the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) for strong violence—a first in Shroff's filmography.
Are the kids and young girls, then, being left out?
As part of her dissertation, Easton is looking at Shroff’s filmography as a case study for modern star construction that relies on self-referencing. “In Shroff’s early career, he invoked the work of his father Jackie Shroff, in a nostalgic way, but also refreshing it. Heropanti uses the whistle-tune from Hero (1983). In Munna Michael, too, there are references to Jackie’s styling. Baaghi 3 even has a cameo.”
But, then, Easton notes, at some point in his career he also begins to reference himself—perhaps, lighting the sparks of his fandom, “In Student of The Year 2, there is a reference to A Flying Jatt.”
Even his gaffes he turned to grist. In April 2022, a clip from Shroff’s debut went viral. There he delivers a dialogue in stillborn anger, “Choti bachi ho kya?” (Are you a little girl?)
Shroff took it on the chin. “Heropanti 2 came out two weeks after the meme blew up, and they somehow managed to get that line into the film—it was dubbed over some other dialogue. He is aware of the silliness of the things he is doing and he is consciously leaning into it,” Easton notes. Intertextuality is a common practice in cinema stardom, but now, “the timespan is much shorter.”
Baaghi being a franchise that is birthing its fourth incarnation is itself the culmination of this intertextuality, one that is only possible if there is a larger-than-life image to build upon, refer to, cite from, and poke fun at—Shroff is the only Hindi film hero of this generation to headline four films in a franchise, the previous generation secreting Govinda’s No. 1 franchise and Akshay Kumar’s Khiladi films.
“Most superstars have peculiar traits that can be intrinsically imitated, be it Amitabh Bachchan’s voice, Shah Rukh Khan’s hands going up, Salman Khan’s swag. Very few actors of this generation have traits that can be spoofed or imitated. These are things the audience loves to watch. Traits may seem funny, turning them into memes, but this is what turns them into cult characters. Tiger Shroff has enough of those traits which can aid him in doing that,” Rathi notes.
The verdict on whether Shroff can build on this intermittent fandom to produce a more substantial and stable stardom is yet to be out. What seems clear is that if that needs to happen, not just Shroff, but even the directors he chooses to frequently work with, have to evolve together—in terms of style, scale, and storytelling.