Vijay Varma, the villain Hindi streaming turned into its leading man

Vijay Varma

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

Born	March 29, 1986 Hyderabad, Telangana, India
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Pink, Gully Boy, Super 30
Awards	Filmfare OTT

Brij Bhatti, the cotton trader at the centre of Matka King, smiles a beat before he lies, and Vijay Varma lets that smile carry most of the scene. For years the same face was Hindi screen shorthand for threat: the entitled young man cornering a woman in Pink, the husband in Darlings who brings flowers the morning after the beating. In Nagraj Manjule’s gambling saga for Prime Video the menace is still there, folded into charm, and viewers in seventeen countries put the show at number one in its opening week. What his career is asking now is whether that charm can travel beyond the streaming queue that made it.

Hyderabad gave him a Marwari family and a father who traded in handicrafts and expected his son to inherit the business. The son wanted anything else. He drifted through courses and jobs that did not stick, found theatre in the city, and in his early twenties left home against his father’s wishes; by his own account the two then spent most of a decade without speaking. The fee for the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune came with a friend’s help, because he could not ask his father to pay for one more course. Father and son have since made peace.

Mumbai after film school moved slowly. A short film, Shor, won best short at the MIAAC festival in New York; television brought Rishta.com; his first feature, Chittagong, cast him as the young revolutionary Jhunku Roy. Small parts in Rangrezz and Gang of Ghosts followed, and then a stretch when he stopped going to auditions and spent more than a year doing theatre with Tom Alter for very little money. He was in his late twenties, born on 29 March 1986, and still waiting for a part anyone would remember.

The door opened through villainy. In Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink, in 2016, he played Ankit Malhotra, one of the young men whose harassment of three women sets off the courtroom drama, and critics noticed him precisely because he was so easy to loathe. Around it came a lead as a conflicted rookie cop in Monsoon Shootout, which had premiered at Cannes years before its Indian release, and a Telugu debut as the antagonist opposite Nani in Middle Class Abbayi, a commercial hit. Raag Desh and Manto kept him working.

Zoya Akhtar’s Gully Boy changed the scale in 2019. As Moeen Arif, a petty car thief who runs drugs through neighbourhood kids and is also the hero’s most loyal friend, he gave the film its moral grey zone and earned a Filmfare nomination for best supporting actor; Film Companion later counted the performance among the hundred greatest of the decade. Streaming did the rest. The second season of Mirzapur handed him twin brothers, Bharat and Shatrughan Tyagi. The BBC cast him as Rasheed, the troubled lecturer of A Suitable Boy, and Imtiaz Ali’s She made him a narcotics dealer.

Two roles then fixed the public image. In Darlings, opposite Alia Bhatt, Hamza Shaikh is a railway employee who beats his wife at night and pleads with her by day; Varma has said he hated every day of being that man. In Dahaad, the Reema Kagti and Zoya Akhtar series that premiered at the Berlinale, he was Anand Swarnakar, a soft-spoken Hindi teacher who courts women and poisons them. That performance won him the Filmfare OTT critics’ award for best actor in a drama series. The same year he played the investigating officer opposite Kareena Kapoor Khan and Jaideep Ahlawat in Sujoy Ghosh’s Jaane Jaan, and joined Ghosh’s segment of Lust Stories 2, the set where he met Tamannaah Bhatia.

Here is the uncomfortable part. The industry that applauds Varma has rarely trusted him with a cinema ticket. When he finally took a romantic lead on the big screen, in Vibhu Puri’s Gustaakh Ishq, a nineties love story about a young poet that marked the designer Manish Malhotra’s debut as a producer, the reviews were warm and the film took roughly ₹1.65 crore net in its first week, a collapse by any measure. His strongest work lives on platforms that do not publish viewing figures the way box offices publish grosses, and even Matka King drew pointed criticism: The Hollywood Reporter India found it timid next to Scam 1992 and accused it of sanitising its antihero. Varma rejects the typecasting argument. He has said he is not refusing bad guys, only asking them to surprise him, and that he allowed himself exactly one serial killer. Yet a decade of menace casts a long shadow, and the one time he stepped fully out of it, cinemas stayed half empty.

The streaming record is harder to argue with. In Anubhav Sinha’s IC 814: The Kandahar Hijack, in 2024, he played Captain Sharan Dev, the pilot of the hijacked Indian Airlines flight, a hero for once, and Netflix’s ensemble comedy Murder Mubarak let him loosen up. Then Matka King arrived on 17 April 2026: eight episodes set in 1960s Bombay, loosely inspired by the gambling boss Ratan Khatri, with Sai Tamhankar and Kritika Kamra beside him. It became Prime Video’s most-watched new Indian drama in two years, reached the top ten in 37 countries, and was renewed for a second season in May.

In September Netflix’s Lust Stories 3 pushed him further from type. He is Hemant, the easygoing husband in Vikramaditya Motwane’s opening segment, a spouse-swap comedy with Radhika Apte and Konkona Sen Sharma, and the gentleness is the joke. His private life became public property during the relationship with Bhatia, which both acknowledged in 2023; reports in early 2025 said they had separated, though neither has confirmed it.

What comes next keeps him at the centre. In Hansal Mehta’s Family Business for Netflix, already shot and still undated, Anil Kapoor’s billionaire grooms him as successor and then fires him, and the series is the war that follows. After that comes an untitled treasure-hunt series from Soumendra Padhi, also for Netflix, with Richa Chadha and Rahul Bhat, aimed at mid-2027, and the second season of Matka King. In all three he plays the man the audience is meant to follow, the part Hindi cinema took longest to offer him.

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Tags: actors, Alia Bhatt, Vijay Varma, Darlings, Gully Boy, Anil Kapoor

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