Irrfan Khan, the Lunchbox actor whose films keep arriving after his death

Irrfan Khan

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

Born	January 7, 1967 Tonk, Rajasthan, India
Died	April 29, 2020 (53)
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Slumdog Millionaire, Life of Pi, Jurassic World
Awards	Padma Shri · National Film · 4 Filmfare · Filmfare (lifetime achievement) · SAG Award (shared)

The newest Irrfan Khan film is older than almost all of his famous ones. The Last Tenant, a Hindi film he shot with a young Vidya Balan before either of them could get a studio to bet on them, sat unseen for decades after its original footage was lost. Its director, Sarthak Dasgupta, rebuilt it from a surviving VHS copy and put it on YouTube for free on the anniversary of the actor’s death. Balan, watching it again, called him “the most natural actor”, a man who never struck a false note. It is a very Irrfan way to keep turning up: quietly, on a format nobody expected, holding the frame without asking for it.

That was always the argument of his career. He acted with almost no visible effort, a held look, a line left half-finished, the eyes doing what other performers needed a monologue for. Hindi cinema waited more than fifteen years before it gave him leads it would stand behind. Hollywood admired him and mostly seated him in the second chair. Between those two hesitations he built a body of work that, read whole, looks less like a crossover story than a long refusal to raise his voice.

The boy who became Irrfan was Sahabzade Irfan Ali Khan, son of a Pashtun family from Tonk, in Rajasthan, where he came into the world on 7 January 1967. His father, Yaseen Ali Khan, ran a tyre business, and the family later moved to Jaipur. He was good enough at cricket to be picked for the CK Nayudu Trophy, the under-23 tournament that feeds first-class cricket in India, and did not go because the travel cost more than the family could spend. A maternal uncle who acted on the Jodhpur stage pointed him elsewhere. After a master’s degree and amateur theatre in Jaipur, he entered the National School of Drama in New Delhi in 1984.

What followed is the apprenticeship his later admirers tend to skip. Mira Nair gave him a small part in Salaam Bombay!, and most of it ended up on the cutting-room floor. In his early Mumbai days he took work repairing air conditioners. For most of a decade he lived on television, in Doordarshan serials such as Bharat Ek Khoj and the fantasy saga Chandrakanta, where he played a double role, and in a teleplay in which he was Lenin.

The turn came from outside. The British director Asif Kapadia cast him as the lead of The Warrior, a historical film shot in eleven weeks across Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan, and Irrfan later credited it with stopping him from giving up acting. Hindi cinema caught up within a couple of years: his villain in Haasil won him the Filmfare award for best performance in a negative role, and Vishal Bhardwaj made him the Macbeth of Maqbool, Shakespeare relocated to the Mumbai underworld.

From there the two careers ran in parallel. Mira Nair brought him back for The Namesake, as a Bengali father learning America, a part that earned him an Independent Spirit Award nomination. In Slumdog Millionaire he was the police inspector interrogating Jamal, and Danny Boyle said he had an instinct for finding “the moral centre” of any character. Ang Lee cast him as the adult Pi in Life of Pi, the narrator who carries the whole film’s memory. At home, Tigmanshu Dhulia’s Paan Singh Tomar, the story of an army steeplechase champion turned outlaw, won him the National Film Award for best actor. Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox, in which a widowed Mumbai clerk falls into a correspondence through a misdelivered tiffin, won the audience award of the Cannes Critics’ Week and a BAFTA nomination.

The crossover story told about him flatters Hollywood more than it should. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian called him an “enormously valuable bridge” between South Asian and Hollywood cinema, and the bridge was real, but look at what crossed it: an Oscorp executive in The Amazing Spider-Man, the billionaire owner of the park in Jurassic World, a supporting turn opposite Tom Hanks in Inferno. Those films put his face in multiplexes everywhere and asked little of him. When Christopher Nolan wanted him for Interstellar, the shoot would have kept him in the United States for months; he wanted to be in India for The Lunchbox and D-Day, and he later described it as one of the hardest decisions he had made. His own country did not always read him better. When The Lunchbox was the film many expected India to send to the Oscars, the selection committee chose The Good Road, and Irrfan said publicly that the jury had passed over a film with a new language and the capacity to reach audiences around the world.

The last stretch was the most commercially secure of his life, and the shortest. Piku, opposite Deepika Padukone and Amitabh Bachchan, turned his dryness into comedy. Hindi Medium, with him as a Delhi shopkeeper scheming to get his daughter into an English-medium school, became a sleeper hit in India and China and won him the Filmfare award for best actor. In March 2018 he announced that he had neuroendocrine cancer. He spent a year in treatment in the United Kingdom and came back to make Angrezi Medium, released on 13 March 2020, a run cut short within days as cinemas closed for the pandemic. He died at Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital in Mumbai on 29 April 2020, aged 53, four days after his mother. A year later his son Babil collected two posthumous Filmfare awards on his behalf: best actor for that final film, and a lifetime achievement prize. India had already given him the Padma Shri, in 2011.

He married Sutapa Sikdar, a writer and fellow graduate of the National School of Drama, in 1995; their sons are Babil, now an actor himself, and Ayan. He played with his own name in public, adding a second “r” to Irfan in 2012 because he liked the sound, and later dropping “Khan” from his billing because, he said, he wanted his work and not his lineage to define him.

The filmography has kept growing without him. The Song of Scorpions, Anup Singh’s desert drama with Golshifteh Farahani, premiered at Locarno in 2017 and only reached Indian cinemas in April 2023, the week of the third anniversary of his death. The Last Tenant arrived in 2026 from a videotape. What the completed work argues is easy to state and hard to copy: that the camera will come to an actor who refuses to go to it. Every late arrival makes the case again.