Gajraj Rao, the ad director who waited 24 years to become a leading man

Gajraj Rao

Photo: Bollywood Hungama / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Occupation	Actor
Known for	Talvar, Badhaai Ho, Dil Se..
Awards	Filmfare (shared)

For most of his working life, Gajraj Rao had the kind of face audiences recognised without being able to name. He was the officer at the edge of the frame, the voice on the phone, the man who delivered one line and left the scene to somebody else. He paid the rent by directing television commercials, and he summed up the arrangement with a joke that doubled as a plan: “I make films for Hindustan Lever and search for good roles in Hindustani cinema!” When the good role finally came, it did not turn him into a star in the usual sense. It turned him into a type, and the question his career has been asking ever since is whether Hindi cinema will let him be anything else.

Rao’s family comes from Dungarpur, in southern Rajasthan, and moved to Delhi when he was five. He grew up in the capital’s railway colonies, neighbourhoods that gathered railway families from across north India, each household with its own dialect. He has said that imitating those dialects was probably the beginning of the actor in him. Yearly train journeys back to Dungarpur kept him among relatives. “We were a typical middle class family that lived life with minimal resources,” he recalled.

Theatre arrived at Delhi University. A friend took him to a performance of Sandhya Chhaya at the Shri Ram Centre in Mandi House, where two young actors played senior citizens, and Rao has described the night as being struck by lightning. He joined V.K. Sharma’s Khilona, a company of adults performing for children, and staged more than a hundred plays. He also fell in with the Act One theatre group started by N.K. Sharma with Ashish Vidyarthi and Manoj Bajpayee, where members read literature and spent twelve to fifteen hours a day together. Theatre, he concluded, could be his life but not his livelihood. Advertising became the living. He directed commercials, later with Code Red Films, and chose them with the fussiness he would later bring to scripts: humour and emotion yes, shampoo no.

The screen career began with a small part in Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen in 1994 and continued for years in fragments. He was a CBI officer in Mani Ratnam’s Dil Se.., Dawood Phanse in Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday and the menacing caller who steers the hero across Mumbai in Raj Kumar Gupta’s Aamir. None of it made him famous, and he has said he never felt bitter. “There are thousands of super talented actors who didn’t even get the small roles that I did,” he told the Press Trust of India. “So why should I complain?”

The change came through a small screen. In 2015 he played Inspector Dhaniram in Meghna Gulzar’s Talvar and a small-town father bewildered by his son’s wedding plans in the Y-Films web series Bang Baaja Baaraat. The Viral Fever then cast him in F.A.T.H.E.R.S. and in the sketches of Tech Conversations with Dad, which put him before a young online audience. He later called his turn to digital “life altering”.

Then came Badhaai Ho. Amit Ravindernath Sharma’s 2018 comedy cast him as Jeetendra Kaushik, a Delhi railway ticket checker whose wife, played by Neena Gupta, becomes pregnant in middle age to the mortification of their grown sons, the elder played by Ayushmann Khurrana. Rao built the character on a travelling ticket examiner he had known in his railway colony, a man as accommodating as Kaushik. The film crossed the 100 crore mark at the box office, and at the Filmfare Awards he shared the prize for best supporting actor with Vicky Kaushal, the first tie in the category’s history. In his late forties, after twenty-four years of bit parts, he found himself giving interviews. “People want to know my point of view on things,” he said at the time. “It’s a new thing.”

The success came with a mould. “After Badhaai Ho, I got a lot of offers to play similar roles,” Rao has said, and for a while the offers won. In Shubh Mangal Zyada Saavdhan he was Shankar Tripathi, the stubborn father who cannot accept his son’s relationship with another man, a part that brought him another Filmfare nomination. In the Disney+ Hotstar series PariWar he was a patriarch trying to hold a quarrelling family together. Profiles began to call him India’s favourite onscreen dad. He said he had no interest in playing a cardboard father, and he went looking for the way out through villainy. Critics have not been fully persuaded. In Maidaan, again directed by Sharma, his sports journalist Roy Choudhary works against Ajay Devgn‘s football coach Syed Abdul Rahim; one review found the film’s villains more caricatured than the rest of its cast, while The Week said Rao gave a predictable arc some heft. In Subhash Kapoor’s Jolly LLB 3, as the industrialist Haribhai Khaitan grabbing farmland, he drew praise for the change of register and, from the same reviewers, the word caricature again. The fault may lie with the writing rather than the actor. The pattern is still hard to ignore: the industry knows exactly what to do with Rao when he is somebody’s father, and far less when he is somebody’s enemy.

Streaming has handed him the leads that cinema rarely does. In Prime Video’s Dupahiya he plays Banwari Jha, the father whose missing motorbike throws a proud, crime-free village into chaos; the second season premiered on 1 October 2026, this time with a mobile phone tower on Banwari’s land feeding the village’s rumours, with Renuka Shahane back beside him and Sonam Nair directing. After a supporting part in Netflix’s Dabba Cartel, in September 2026 he appeared in Lust Stories 3, in Vishal Bhardwaj‘s segment set in 1987 Hyderabad opposite Aditi Rao Hydari and Siddharth, where one reviewer singled him out as the show-stealer.

He remains, by his own description, an anxious performer. Even now, he says, he feels nervous the day before a shoot, every day on set is “like an exam” and the annotated script is “my map”. He is married to Sanjana Rao, and they have two sons.

The next test is a man with no family to protect. In Vikramaditya Motwane’s Dada, the Sourav Ganguly biopic starring Rajkummar Rao, he plays Jagmohan Dalmiya, the administrator who led Indian cricket’s board during Ganguly’s years as captain. The film is expected in 2027. A power broker in a suit is the role that could show whether the late-blooming father of Hindi cinema has another face in him.

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Tags: actors, Neena Gupta, Hindi cinema, Dupahiya, Badhaai Ho, Gajraj Rao

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