AYUSHMANN KHURRANA

Your family can keep you grounded, make you keep things real.

I think I am filled with excitement when it comes to doing films.

Writers have always been very underrated.

I'd love to do a film on homosexuality. That's on my radar.

My debut, 'Vicky Donor,' was when I was 27. If I was a star kid, it would've been 22. I don't think the difference of five years would've affected much.

With 'Badhaai Ho,' the lines are so quirky and the situation is so humorous, awkward, and bizarre that people are taking away a lot from the film. The dialogues are amazing. We aren't trying to make people laugh, but the situation is like that, that people are laughing.

I think a film is made with each and every cast member. If the casting is strong, half our job is done. Then, even the mundane line is delivered in a great fashion.

I think cricket and cinema are two big entities in the country. If you are part of either, you are sorted.

I was a part of the reality show wave in 2002. Back then, no one had seen non-fiction on TV, and we had no reference point, so we all were just excited to see cameras around us.

I always wanted to act in movies.

I'm glad I've established this as my zone: 'the taboo breaker.'

Life is the biggest workshop: you have to observe life. You have to be one with the milieu more than anything else.

I played Shylock in my school's staging of 'Merchant of Venice.'

It is good to be a young father, a young parent. You have that energy, and you are growing up with them.

The running thread of my career has been different scripts.

I couldn't be a conventional commercial actor without being a star-kid. That kind of a big film needs a certain mounting, a little paraphernalia around you. And nobody would give me that.

It happens in the West most of the time - the biggest of stars, they audition. That's how it should happen.

I have realised that at the end of the day, I have to detach from my films, just do my job, and move on.

If I were a star kid, I wouldn't have tried so many things. I would have done theatre and directly joined movies. I did radio and TV shows because I had to carve my own way. Outsiders like me have to reach Bollywood through modelling, theatre, or radio.

If you are changing yourself with every film, you will be exhausted as an actor.

My son had seen 'Dum Laga Ke Haisha,' but he wasn't happy about it because my father bullies me in the film.

I was very immature when I married.

I am the public, a boy from Chandigarh who's bought tickets in black and revered films since childhood, and when I choose scripts, I take out the garb of an actor-slash-star, and I consume the script as a layman.

I think actors are very obsessed about looking different and behaving differently, but all people need is just a different film. They don't want a different you; they want a different story.

An actor's off-screen persona should never overshadow his on-screen characters.