Honestly, I was a tad disappointed to see Shahid Kapoor — and his, as usual, perfectly groomed face — when he walked through his office door. Over the past week or so, the paparazzi had been snapping him, mainly outside airports, wearing a bowler hat, his face covered with a handkerchief, as if guarding a secret look. What was he hiding then?
“Oh, a haircut went wrong, bro. I’d gone bald from either side. And my long moustache [which he grew for his character, Raja Ratan Sen, in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Padmavati], after being chopped, made me look like Charlie Chaplin. I just couldn’t be photographed like that,” he says.
He tells me I look about the same since we last met, four or five years ago. I take it as a compliment, but can hardly say the same for him. Everything about Kapoor has changed since. His films, his life — he’s married now, and has a child.
“I really found myself in the past four to five years,” he says, digging into his homemade lunch. He’s just come back from a photo shoot and is famished. “When I came in [to Bollywood in 2003], the way things used to be was dying. It was essentially a period of transition.”
Excerpted from Elle’s December cover story. To read the full story, subscribe to the print edition here or download the digital edition here.
Shahid Kapoor’s fierce photo shoot from ELLE’s December issue:
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