Rohit Saraf is closing Mismatched and trying to outgrow the boy Netflix made him

Rohit Saraf

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

Born	December 8, 1996 Kathmandu
Occupation	Actor

On Netflix, Rohit Saraf has spent years as Rishi, the young man in Mismatched who believes in arranged marriage, says what he feels out loud and lets Prajakta Koli’s Dimple be the one with the ambitious plan. The critic Raja Sen called him a “refreshingly non-alpha hero”, and that softness is what made Saraf recognisable to a generation that watches Hindi drama on a phone. On Prime Video he is now Sachindra Nath Sanyal, a young man organising armed resistance against British rule in Nikkhil Advani’s The Revolutionaries. Both characters belong to the same stretch of his career, and only one of them is about to be retired.

Saraf was born in Kathmandu into a Marwari family and grew up in Delhi. He has said in interviews that although he was born in Nepal, his family has always been Indian, a point he has had to make in public because of online trolling about his nationality. His father, Suresh Saraf, died when Rohit was still a boy. Acting had been the father’s dream for his son, and at fifteen, with only his tenth-standard exams behind him, Rohit moved to Mumbai on his own to chase it.

The first work was television: the Channel V teen drama Best Friends Forever? and then the Life OK serial Ek Boond Ishq. Cinema arrived through small, well-placed parts. In Gauri Shinde’s Dear Zindagi he played Kiddo, the younger brother of Alia Bhatt‘s character. In Iram Haq’s Norwegian drama What Will People Say he was Amir, the cousin, in a film Norway went on to submit to the Academy Awards. In Yash Raj Films’ Hichki he was Akshay, a student from the privileged class set against the outsiders Rani Mukerji’s teacher takes on.

The Sky Is Pink is where his own life and the work met. Shonali Bose’s film follows parents who lose a child, and Saraf played Ishaan, the son who survives, opposite Priyanka Chopra and Farhan Akhtar. Bose had lost her elder son; Saraf had lost his father. “I thought that I had made peace with my father’s death, but this film gave me a closure which I never thought I would need,” he told an interviewer, adding that Bose had called him the third son she never had. Saibal Chatterjee wrote for NDTV that he “gives a solid account of himself”, and Anna M. M. Vetticad of Firstpost called it a “rock solid performance”.

Streaming then did what the multiplex had not. In Anurag Basu’s ensemble black comedy Ludo he had a part with barely any lines, and The Times of India still singled him out. Days later Netflix launched Mismatched, Gazal Dhaliwal’s adaptation of Sandhya Menon’s novel When Dimple Met Rishi, produced by Ronnie Screwvala’s RSVP. Three seasons followed, each built on the chemistry between Saraf and Koli, which critics praised even when they found fault with the writing.

He used the attention to move sideways across Indian cinema rather than straight up. He took the lead opposite Anandhi in the Tamil romance Kamali from Nadukkaveri, played Shatak, the younger brother of Hrithik Roshan’s gangster, in Vikram Vedha, and accepted a small role as Ranvijay Yadav in Mani Ratnam’s Tamil crime saga Thug Life, with Kamal Haasan at its centre.

The streaming fame has not turned into theatrical pull, and that is the part of the story his admirers tend to skip. Ishq Vishk Rebound, his first lead in a Hindi film, opened on roughly 700 to 800 screens and finished around six crore rupees. Reviewing it for Rediff, Mayur Sanap panned the film and allowed Saraf only a “charming enough screen presence”. In Dharma Productions’ Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari he was fourth-billed in a Varun Dhawan and Janhvi Kapoor vehicle that drew mixed reviews. The gentleness that makes Rishi work on a small screen reads, in a cinema hall, as a lack of menace, and Hindi cinema still sells its male stars on menace.

The Revolutionaries is the correction he chose. Adapted from Sanjeev Sanyal’s history of India’s armed independence movement, the eight-episode series puts him beside Bhuvan Bam‘s Rash Behari Bose, Pratibha Ranta’s Pratibha Lahiri and Gurfateh Pirzada’s Bagha Jatin. Reviewers split along a telling line. For India TV, Himanshi Tiwari wrote that he “strikes a good balance between the character’s innocence and his revolutionary ideas”. Subhash K Jha was blunter: “Rohit Saraf as Sachindra Nath Sanyal tries too hard.” Read side by side, the two verdicts describe one effort: an actor pushing visibly against the register that made him famous.

Prime Video released the series worldwide on 11 September 2026, and reviews of the show itself were mixed. In February 2026 Netflix announced that the fourth season of Mismatched would be its last, with Saraf and Koli back as Rishi and Dimple; it has been shooting in Mumbai and still has no release date. Forbes India had already placed him on its 30 Under 30 list in 2025.

Next comes Mahakali, Puja Kolluru’s Telugu mythological film in the screen universe Prasanth Varma opened with Hanu-Man. It is Saraf’s first Telugu film, he plays the male lead, and it is currently dated for 8 January 2027. Trade reports also name him as Ranjha in Sajid Ali’s Heer Ranjha, written by Imtiaz Ali and produced by Ektaa Kapoor, with filming reported to begin in September 2026. Those two films ask audiences to let go of Rishi, while the final Mismatched asks them to say goodbye to him properly. Whichever reaches the public first will shape the version of Rohit Saraf that cinema audiences meet next.

Tags: actors, Hindi cinema, Nikkhil Advani, The Revolutionaries, Rohit Saraf, Mismatched