Kanguva: The return of Bobby Deol, from 1990s Bollywood hero to all-India star

The actor speaks to The National about his comeback, his coming Tamil debut with Kanguva and how director Sandeep Reddy Vanga changed his life

Bollywood actor Bobby Deol is making his Tamil film debut with Kanguva, starring alongside Suriya. Antonie Robertson / The National

Bobby Deol has been having an excellent year. His last film, Animal, directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga and released globally last December, is currently the eighth highest-grossing Indian film of all time, earning more than 9 billion rupees (US$108.67 million) on a 1 billion rupees budget. His portrayal of a mute antagonist in the action thriller earned him the International Indian Film Academy Award for Best Performance in a Negative Role this year.

And if Kanguva is any indication, he's just getting started. The fantasy-action adventure, directed by Siva and co-starring Suriya, marks the Bollywood actor's debut in the Tamil film industry. The Gupt actor plays the bad guy for the fifth time after Naqaab (2007), Love Hostel (2022) and the web series Aashram (2020-present).

"There's so much I've gained throughout the 29 years I've spent in the industry. So there's a bank of memories that help me while I perform; of people I've met over the years, and I've seen behave," he tells The National. "Those have been my points of reference, actually, when playing the antagonist – because I've realised seeing and working with the people who've been in my life, that bad people don't necessarily know they're bad; they believe what they're doing is the right thing to do."

Siva, Bobby tells us, made the process of doing a movie in a language he's never known or spoken before a whole lot easier for him. "He'd explain the meaning of each dialogue, and I'd first make a run for it in Hindi, mostly to know what the emotion needed to be. It was a massive challenge, but Siva was there every step of the way, and guided me through every day of the shoot schedule."

Made on a reported budget of 3 billion rupees, Kanguva is among India's most expensive films and goes back 700 years. Without a reference point or a cornerstone for the timeline it's set in, Deol explains the director offered significant help when explaining exactly what he wanted out of the story and the actors playing a part in it.

"If you've seen the trailer, you know how different our body language is compared to how people behave today. We're more larger-than-life expressively, because that's how raw humans were back then."

While Animal may have cemented his meteoric revival as an actor, it didn't start there. Since his return to acting in 2017, he's had at least one box office success every year between then and 2019. Vanga's film was only the cherry on top – in stark contrast to the downward turn his career took between 2008 and 2013.

What changed?

Deol credits his streaming projects. "After my pivot to streaming, people both within and outside the industry looked at me in a different way," says Deol who worked with Shah Rukh Khan's studio, Red Chillies Entertainment, on two films: Atul Sabharwal's drama Class of '83, which premiered on Netflix in 2020, followed by romantic thriller Love Hostel, which released on Zee5 in 2022.

"Those films somehow influenced a lot of filmmakers who probaby thought, 'alright, Bobby Deol can do more; he's got it in him'. And then Sandeep Reddy Vanga came and changed my life."

Deol doesn't plan on letting go of the momentum in his professional life just yet. He's following Kanguva up with another Tamil project, in which he co-stars with superstar Vijay. He also has two projects in the Telugu language – the historical action-adventure Hari Hara Veera Mallu, starring Pawan Kalyan, and another as yet untitled one in the works with veteran Telugu actor Nandamuri Balakrishna. There are also some Bollywood projects on the horizon.

"I can confirm that I'm working with Anurag Kashyap," he says. "But, and while I'm really excited for a lot of stuff in the future, I can't say more than that, because we're in the age of contracts and NDAs."

Kanguva will be released in cinemas globally on Thursday