Kajol (left) and Shah Rukh Khan at the Berlin premier of their film My Name is Khan. PHOTO/NDTV.
He’s the biggest movie star in the world. Because even if you never heard of Shah Rukh Khan, a billion people in India — and more across the Middle East, Africa and beyond — certainly have. He’s the biggest draw in the outrageously oversized films that come from the Hindi-film industry often called Bollywood.
How big a draw is that? More people around the world watch Shah Rukh Khan than Meryl Streep or Brad Pitt. Maybe Meryl Streep and Brad Pitt. His film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, made in 1995, is still playing in one Mumbai cinema.
“In India, the films are not looked upon just as entertainment,” Khan says. “They’re a way of life.”
And Shah Rukh Khan has made them his life. At age 44, he owns a production company and is host of India’s version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. And he keeps starring in Bollywood productions — films that get shown everywhere from remote Indian villages to multiplexes in New York.
In some ways, that broad distribution requires a certain style of filmmaking.
“The idea is that you have to some way make a film that appeals to my 90-year-old grandmother and to the 9-year-old kid,” Khan says. “So it’s like a cabaret. Like, I have a couple of films written by American guys, and I bring them back to Mumbai, make them sit down. And then I say: ‘OK, here’s the song, and here’s the mother.’ ‘But there’s no mother in the film.’ And I say, ‘There has to be a mother in the film.’ ”
In movies that commonly last three hours, Khan might howl his lines, with his hair flying everywhere. He may dance on the roof of a moving train. It comes with the territory.
“People talk about Bollywood being very kitsch,” he acknowledges, “and just songs and dances, and over the top and colorful.”
But in his latest production, being released in the U.S. Feb. 12, he’s not doing anything quite that over the top. He plays a Muslim man with Asperger’s syndrome who is driven after the events of Sept. 11 to constantly repeat a single explosive phrase:
“My name is Khan, and I’m not a terrorist.”
From A Real-Life Horror, ‘The Butterfly Effect’ For Two Innocents
A Muslim star in a mostly Hindu country, Khan says he has always been interested in the challenge of starting from a real-life incident and weaving a fictional story around it.
“And there is an aspect of Islam that needs to be addressed now, otherwise this demarcation, this divide we keep on increasing,” he says. “So I just thought we should have a message about a film with humanity. Just goodness.”
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