The 10 Best Performances of Kareena Kapoor Khan, Ranked

For most Hindi film performers, stardom is the final frontier. But Kareena Kapoor Khan started as a star. It just seemed like something she was born with. She didn’t have to break into the film industry; it was already her natural habitat. Actors often require the crutch of fiction to shine. In her case, it’s fiction that has required the crutch of her persona to shine.

Characters like Poo and Geet owe their popularity to Bebo and Kareena, not the other way around. As a result, over the last 24 years, performing has been her final frontier. It’s like beginning at the summit — lonely, peerless, dizzying — and striving to reach firm ground.

It’s tricky when charisma is the default state of being. This is why some of her most effective characters are the ones who die; death is harder to process when life appears so effortless. Regardless of how bad or good the movies are, her aura has remained unscathed.

Think about it: how many hall-of-fame Kareena roles truly exist? Yet, it has never mattered. It’s never mattered that she’s played more heroines than women, more parts than wholes. If that isn’t a sign of superstardom, what is? It’s lazy to conclude that she could have been more. But it’s romantic to admit that she cares – now more than ever. 

Hansal Mehta’s The Buckingham Murders is Kareena Kapoor Khan’s latest lunge at mortality. It’s also as good a time as any to write about — and rank — 10 of her finest performances:

Kareena Kapoor Khan

10. Kurbaan (2009)

For reasons all too obvious, movies like Kurbaan aren’t made anymore, which makes it easier to appreciate them through the shaky lens of hindsight. Kapoor Khan’s frantic portrayal of a psychology professor who discovers that her charming husband (Saif Ali Khan) is an undercover terrorist in post-9/11 America isn’t extraordinary. She is Bollywood-happy one day, and the next, she’s not. It isn’t the first time we’ve seen a character torn between heartbreak and fear. But there’s something to be said about how she plays her character, Avantika, as more of a pained wife than a patriotic Indian. For her, humanity trumps politics. There are glimpses of Alia Bhatt’s future turn in Raazi, particularly when Avantika struggles to un-love him in the second half. It’s a testament to Kapoor Khan’s talent that her image of fragility feeds the film instead of hijacking it.

9. Asoka (2001)

Not enough is said about how Kareena Kapoor Khan — especially in her early career years — was a great song actress. Kapoor Khan’s rendition of an orphaned princess in Santosh Sivan’s Asoka went hand in glove with the young character’s accelerated adolescence. At first, this teenager, Kaurvaki, is playful and almost musical in nature, flirting with remnants of her royal heritage: she’s excited by her own eyes, her spirit, her body. She teases and twirls across waterfalls and shrubs in San Sanana, before turning her sexuality into a combative performance in Raat Ka Nasha. She reaches peak fantasy in the wistful Roshni Se, where the hero’s grief retreats into her sensual nature ballad. Even when Kaurvaki takes the battlefield as a warrior, Kapoor Khan supplies her action with the awkwardness of a girl on the brink of womanhood. It’s like she’s still dancing, but behind the facade of violence.

8. Talaash: The Answer Lies Within (2012)

More often than not, Kapoor Khan tends to exude a celestial charm that makes the movie surrounding her look human. The smarter films mine this quality. Like Reema Kagti’s supernatural thriller Talaash, where Kapoor Khan’s other-worldly aura is staged as just that: other-worldly. In only a handful of scenes, the actress nails the phantom-like presence of Rosie, an alluring Mumbai escort who is ultimately revealed to be a ghost. She is only visible to the grief-stricken protagonist (Aamir Khan), but there’s something so flashy about the way she speaks and behaves that it’s hard to envision her as part of the mortal environment. It’s as if her audiovisual volume is different — a higher pitch, a posthumous glow — from the rest of the story. In most films, this might have felt jarring. But here, it’s the perfect marriage of celebrity and spirit.

7. Ek Main Aur Ekk Tu (2012)

Riana Braganza is best described as Dharma Productions’ version of Jab We Met’s Geet Dhillon. Funky hair stylist. Ultra-fashionable. Electric scooter. Las Vegas. Drifter. Urban poor. Vibrant, verbose, but very sure of her aspirational-NRI self. She has the emotional ambiguity of someone who finds what she wants by virtue of knowing what she doesn’t. It’s also not often that you admire a female lead who fixes the hero by friend-zoning him. But Kapoor Khan humanises this ‘flakiness’ in a story that upends the manic-pixie template. It never feels like a rejection. It’s a perceptive performance — full of reactions and uncertainty and incomplete thoughts — that does the usual modern-girl thing without committing to a type. In a way, this is her anti-romcom, and everyone else is just living (in) it.

Kareena Kapoor Khan

6. Dev (2004)

Already a superstar in waiting, Kapoor Khan marked her mainstream ascent with a smattering of steady supporting acts. These characters were more transformative than meaty — often the social and moral fulcrums of busy male-centric narratives. This ability to play the cog in multi-starrer wheels resulted in scene-stealing performances like the one in Dev, Govind Nihalani’s raw communal drama centred on Hindu-Muslim unrest. The film is named after the Amitabh Bachchan character, while much of the conflict revolves around men played by Om Puri and Fardeen Khan. But Kapoor Khan remains the beating heart as Aaliya, a young Muslim woman whose desire softens the radicalisation of her lover. She bridges the void between naivety and innocence, with her presence alone prosecuting the masculinity of the setting. It’s a turn that transcends the publicity surrounding Kapoor Khan’s first “no-makeup” role.

5. Jaane Jaan (2023)

Kapoor’s Maya D’Souza in Sujoy Ghosh’s The Devotion of Suspect X adaptation is a single mother who hides from her troubled past in a misty hill town. It’s a love triangle masquerading as a thriller. For much of the film, she enlists the help of one lovelorn man to conceal a crime from another. The actress, however, expands this role with the baggage of her own stardom. The performance unfolds as a delicate duet between a damsel-in-distress heroine — which is how the male characters view her — and a hardened survivor. Two moments encapsulate this. Kapoor Khan acts like nobody’s watching in the scene where Maya strangles her abusive husband to death: guttural, messy, desperate. But she acts like everybody’s watching in the scene where she sings at a karaoke bar for the besotted cop: enchanting, poised, flicking on the superstar switch. All along, Kapoor Khan resists the urge to stage Maya as the mastermind. Because there is no last laugh; even her manipulations are rooted in vulnerability.

4. Laal Singh Chaddha (2022)

It’s tempting to suggest that Kapoor Khan excels in this Forrest Gump remake because Aamir Khan makes a meal of his role. But the truth is that Kapoor Khan’s depiction of Rupa — a character immortalised by Robin Wright as Jenny — is replete with an original brand of sadness. Screen time is not a factor; she’s present, especially when she’s not. Kapoor Khan turns Rupa into a tender tragedy: an able-bodied victim of circumstances who cedes the stage to her differently-abled soulmate. She had it all and messed it up; he had nothing and stumbled into fame. It always feels like hers is a parallel film that she’s too ashamed to reveal. One glance at Rupa’s face in the opening strands of Tere Hawaale, and it emerges that Kapoor Khan is playing a woman who starts dying the day she is born. It’s not so much a performance as a subdued symphony of wounds.

3. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham…(2001)

Pooja “Poo” Sharma was an influencer before social media existed. Poo was a glam nepo-baby before it became a bad word. Poo was a parody of a Zoya Akhtar character before Akhtar made a film. Poo was the human manifestation of a selfie before selfies happened. Poo was just ahead of her time — or at least the time on her diamond-studded Rolex. Between dolling up for college with Geri Halliwell’s It’s Raining Men on full blast, to cooing “tell me how it waaas” in her best Mean Girls impression, a 20-year-old Kapoor Khan’s Poo became the de-facto queen (read “kween”) of the MTV generation. Beneath all the primadonna flair, though, you could tell that Kapoor Khan got the brief. She oozed context: A simple Delhi girl who had such a rough time fitting in abroad that Western pop culture became her mask. The cult of Poo grows with each passing year. Particularly when we see new-age industry kids stumble in their pursuit of performative poo-ness.

Kareena Kapoor Khan

2. Jab We Met (2007)

Geet Dhillon is not a name; it’s a cultural institution. An instructive sound of the Hindi film-making idiom: “Do a Geet,” say casting agents and directors and screenwriters, to extract a manic-pixie-dream-girl performance. A social identifier: “She’s such a Geet” is shorthand for “She is a gullible rebel and hopeless romantic at once”. An Indian male fantasy: “She’s such a Geet” is how millennials describe bubbly girlfriends. And finally, the first-bencher of the Kareena Kapoor Khan multiverse: “What if Poo and Geet met?” I imagine, while watching a dark arthouse drama. It’s fitting that Kapoor Khan’s most iconic character is a worthy distillation of her duality. The pale silence of post-breakup Geet hits hard only because she is naturally exuberant: it’s as if she becomes both ghost and griever. It’s also fitting that Geet (meaning “song”) is the sort of audible persona that fans used to associate Preity Zinta with. After all, Zinta’s brooding Naina (meaning “eyes”) in Kal Ho Naa Ho was a visual persona that Kapoor Khan famously rejected.

1. Omkara (2006)

Kapoor’s adaptation of Othello’s Desdemona is haunting for how chaste it is. Her Dolly Mishra will stand the test of time for not only succumbing to the whims of rural masculinity and Shakespearean rage but also perishing in a world she is too uncomplicated for. Even in the moments that don’t feature her, Dolly is tangible — like the only thing standing between the men and their most primitive selves. She bristles with unconditional love and loyalty while suppressing her own survival instincts. There are times when Kapoor Khan’s performance almost snatches life from the jaws of certain death. Like the way she subtly calibrates Dolly’s body language and agency around Omkara; like how her soft glances at Kesu validate Langda Tyagi’s lies and defy them at once; like the tension of her final moments. In other words, she allows the details and deceptions of Vishal Bhardwaj’s masterpiece to earn a life — and legacy — of its own.

Special Mentions:

Udta Punjab (2016)
Kapoor Khan delivers a humane turn as a doctor who gets sacrificed at the altar of Punjab’s drug problem.

3 Idiots (2009)

Kapoor Khan’s underrated comic timing finds a home in this male buddy movie. Her drunken monologue about Gujarati snacks is so funny that it sounds unscripted.