How Kareena Kapoor Shot 'Chameli' With a 100 kg Saree; and Why Vicky Kaushal Wasn't the First Choice for 'Masaan'

In the world of cinema, they both had a foot in the door — one more than the other — through the families they were born into, making one the empress of a 25-year reign, and the other the prince of the niche he’s carved out in 10 years.

One debuted at the turn of the millennium in a launch vehicle that was a J. P. Dutta Partition drama — Refugee — opposite a fellow star kid; not quite what she was promised, which was the debut act of the century in Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai. The stakes for her were low compared to those of her male counterparts from film families, but she swung it in her favour, outrunning her competition regardless of their age and ̣gender.

The other has just clocked a decade since his first lead act in Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan, a story of fated love across caste lines that births an all-consuming grief. It made everyone sit up and take note of an unlikely hero whose eyes grazed the depths of melancholy even in a moment of levity. It kept you intrigued, wondering what else he could convey to an audience that wasn’t accustomed to seeing a leading man with vulnerability that didn’t threaten his masculinity.

On the surface, Kareena Kapoor Khan, 44, and Vicky Kaushal, 37, don’t have a lot in common besides being bona fide stars of their generations. But upon a closer look, one finds patterns emerge — of trajectories that took turns few saw coming.

If one were to compare their strike rates, Kaushal in 10 years has starred in 27 films — averaging nearly three per year — mirroring Kapoor Khan’s, with over 65 titles in 25 years. In the age of detoxes and slow living, the duo has chosen to walk the other way, embracing the business in its entirety — the good, the bad and the ugly — with stoic consistency, so as to keep things interesting.

Kapoor Khan’s ascent has been marked with a kind of irreverence that borders on cockiness that was, until her arrival, reserved for the tallest male superstar in the room. Within her first year, she stormed through the landscape of Indian entertainment, becoming a fixture on screens big and small. From cola commercials on TV to five big releases in 2001 that ranged from Mujhe Kucch Kehna Hai and Aśoka to Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham... — she built the stuff Bollywood canon is made of. And regardless of their fate at the box office, Kapoor Khan walked out of each act owning them in a way that would go on to catapult her into the stratospheres of fame. But she trod upon that path rather lightly.

Kapoor Khan, by her own admission, has never taken anything too seriously, least of all her failures and successes, or even her fame, that requires one to curate and tailor an image that could retrofit their popularity.

The ease is almost instinctive to the actress, a mean feat considering she was always at the risk of being obscured by the giant shadow of her sister Karisma, the most dependable female lead of the ‘90s, across genres. Perhaps that is what warranted her to carry the weight of her privileges first, and her stardom soon after, lightly, so they wouldn’t bog her down when she made her career choices.

For someone who gave the world Poo (Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham...) and Geet (Jab We Met) — characters now cultural shorthands — Kapoor Khan also transformed into Chameli, Dolly Mishra (Omkara), and Aaliya (Dev) with a wide-eyed surrender that defined her range. “Chameli is a fairytale, where her character is in an impossible situation and then meets Rahul Bose’s character,” says Sudhir Mishra, director of Chameli. “The movie’s premise was such that she had to film in the rain for hours on end and that saree would start weighing a hundred kilos, and the director of photography had to light her skin in a certain way. She would keep at it, and while you, as a director, are sometimes engrossed in the moment, you say ‘cut’ when you think it’s done,” Mishra recalls. But out of respect for the craft and the process, the actress would keep going and do something he hadn’t told her. “And magic would emerge in those moments. So, after that, I stopped saying ‘cut’”.

Mishra attributes this ability and her versatility to Kapoor Khan’s untapped potential as an actor who has an astonishing range. “I can see her lean into that side of her more these days,” he says. This refusal to take her audience for granted has cemented her status as an artiste unafraid of risk or reinvention. Rather than chasing stardom’s trappings, she leaned into it with surprising security, embracing “indie” films and ensemble-led projects until they became second nature. Even with her recent OTT venture — Netflix’s Jaane Jaan (2023) — and the commercially underwhelming theatrical outing The Buckingham Murders (2024), Kapoor Khan fearlessly straddled resilience and fragility. “I wasn’t sure whether she wanted to do something like this until someone suggested her name. But when she came on board, she completely surrendered to the role without any vanity or the ego of a star,” says Hansal Mehta, director of The Buckingham Murders. A lot of the scenes that Mehta initially planned were largely expository. However, with Kapoor Khan taking up the mantle, he reined in that narrative style. “It’s her lack of ego that allows her to bring such vulnerability on screen with very little dialogue,” he says. It’s a space, one may argue, that is more familiar to Kaushal.

From having a ringside view of the industry’s big-ticket, blockbuster machinery with Anurag Kashyap’s neo-noir thriller Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016) and Anand Tiwari’s guileless little romcom Love Per Square Foot (2018), Kaushal rather seamlessly transitioned into playing the different shades of the man in love — whether with his nation in Raazi (2018), Uri: The Surgical Strike (2019), Sardar Udham (2021) and Sam Bahadur (2023), or with a woman, mired in all the fraught glory of the emotion in Lust Stories (2018), Manmarziyaan (2018) and Govinda Naam Mera (2022). It established him as the lead male star whose masculinity is remarkably bolstered by his gentleness.

The actor’s performances are almost meditative, anchored in a sincerity that comes with being completely immersed in their craft. In Masaan, the film that put Kaushal on the map, director Neeraj Ghaywan reveals that he wasn’t even the first choice. “There was another actor we had chosen earlier but couldn’t go ahead with them because they had some other commitments. I had known Vicky since we were both assistant directors in Gangs of Wasseypur. But I couldn’t imagine him as a man from Uttar Pradesh, since he has always been this Punjabi boy who is a Mumbaikar,” he says. However, upon watching his audition tape, the filmmaker was pleasantly surprised to see what Kaushal was capable of. “He went the distance to play his character of Deepak in Masaan, and that’s what I like about him as an actor. Over the years, regardless of what success he’s found, what stature and clout he comes with, he has not let that public persona seep into his characters,” Ghaywan says.

Actress Shweta Tripathi, who played Kaushal’s love interest in Masaan, agrees. She says the fun part of knowing him is that through the years he hasn’t changed. “It’s the same hard work, humility and passion because you can tell his heart is in the right place.” At the same time, “he’s not a people-pleaser. It’s not like he will not speak up about the things he has a problem with, but he will say it so respectfully and in a way that he will get heard,” she says, underlining his firm but gentle presence, even on screen.

This is, perhaps, another quality common to both the stars — of projecting fierceness with tenderness and grace. And while the two may not have performed together yet, Kapoor Khan’s legacy and Kaushal’s ascent could easily find ways of collapsing into each other through their other shared instinct for never settling and remaining unfazed by their Friday verdicts. The two have carved their stardom not only despite their misses, but also because of them, owning each misstep like a milestone.

Their crowns are crafted more with instinct and less by design, and rest lightly on their heads. And understandably so, lest their weight slow the stars down as actors who can’t wait to reinvent, fall and get back up again each time — all in a bid to become era-defining entertainers who have gradually shifted the needle of the craft, one performance at a time.