Shah Rukh Khan Charms Locarno Crowd As He Talks Stardom, Brad Pitt & Jackie Chan Friendship: “He Promised To Open A Chinese Restaurant With Me”

Stephanie Bunbury
·5 min read

There was a spontaneous singalong, shrieks of “I love you” and the clanking of a cowbell one audience member had brought to remind Shah Rukh Khan of the film he made long ago in the Alps: the Indian megastar’s masterclass at the Locarno Film Festival was the closest Switzerland comes to pandemonium. Facing a capacity crowd at Locarno’s venerable Gran Rex cinema, SRK accepted the adulation and declarations of love with the gracious fan-friendliness that has made him beloved for 35 years.

Stardom, he insisted, really doesn’t matter. “Being able to entertain people when they come into contact with me is the most important thing,” he said during an hour-long interview with festival director Giona Nazzaro. “I want them to take away something entertaining. It could be sad entertainment, it could be good entertainment, it could be romantic entertainment. But for me, I’ve never understood the stardom part of it.

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“I try and give joy. I fall, I somersault, I run, I fight, I sing, I romance, I become a bad guy – I’m like a monkey, I’ll do anything to give you joy. And then, when people get joy, they like me back. And that liking becomes adulation, because ‘OK, this is nice, it gives us joy.’ They take time out from their lives, from their jobs, sit down for two hours, get happiness and respond by saying ‘we love you’. Stardom is just a circumstantial, consequential by-product of this. It has nothing to do with me. Or them. Nothing to do with what I do or what they do. It’s a different thing.

“So I have never thought of stardom as important. Yes, I respect it a lot. It has given me a lot of recognition, respect, love, money, my family is happy for it. But beyond that, stardom is not what I carry as the first thing when I walk into a room. I have always said I wear stardom like a T-shirt, not a tuxedo.  I’m careless about it. But if it’s not there, will this love go? I don’t think so.” The audience squealed as one. “No!!”.

SRK, 58, has made over a hundred films, almost all in Hindi; according to the Times of India, he is also the third richest actor in the world. He is at the Locarno Film Festival to receive a lifetime achievement award; the festival is also showing Devdas, an extravagant epic that had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 2002 when Indian popular cinema was relatively little known and less appreciated in Europe. But the West has caught up: tickets to the masterclass were sold out a day after they were released.

Ranging over the hits and misses of his career, King Khan – as he is popularly known – described his own fandom for Hong Kong action star and director Jackie Chan. “He promised to open a Chinese restaurant with me as partners – and he hasn’t done it!” he said with mock outrage. He also described wearing a fake jaw adapted from a similar prosthetic made for Brad Pitt. A cry of adoring protest came from an audience member. “I’ll tell Mr Brad Pitt you said that!” replied Khan with a chuckle, leaving it to us to guess what she had said.

SRK has made several of his most popular films with female directors. Was there any difference? Nazzaro ventured, clearly with some trepidation. The star responded without hesitation. “There is a hundred per cent some kind of a difference – not a major difference that would be a decision-making reason or a deal-breaking reason, but I do find, having worked a lot with women as actors, as producers, as directors, I do find them a little more sensitive, a little more nuanced.”

But SRK is never earnest for too long. “Also, I don’t want to diminish male directors who are very nice optically,” he went on, “but women also make the films look nicer. And I don’t want to be inappropriate – if anyone on social media finds this inappropriate, please don’t – but they do smell better.  They smell nicer, they laugh more …. Having said that, I’m more in touch with my feminine side, I feel – look at the way we’re sitting.” Both he and Nazzaro had their legs crossed. He was looking for a laugh, of course, but he meant it. “I’m not so interested in guns and fighting. I like the personal.”

Audience questions showed how far people were prepared to go for King Khan: the first question came from a woman who had brought her whole family over from Washington DC for the occasion. The last question came from two young women who had met at an Indian dance class in Germany and arrived wearing saris, one carrying a meticulously rendered oil painting she had made of a scene from Devdas. But they also had a serious question. After all the genres he had covered – action, romance, comedy – and having won the adoration of billions, was there anything SRK still aspired to do?

Every day, came the equally serious answer  “This is a little at variance with how people talk when they say you should be calm and contented and meditate, accept life as it is and have peace,” said Khan. “I think contentment is overrated. I think you need to be dissatisfied. Always need to question yourself. I don’t feel satisfied, ever.”

To the young people in the audience, he had a word of warning: not to rest on whatever laurels they had accumulated, ever. “I don’t think I’ve achieved anything,” he went on. “I don’t think it’s over and done with, that I’m successful. That’s irrelevant. What is relevant is: can I do something new tomorrow? When I’ve done something, it’s over and done. When a movie is over, I take a two-hour bath and after that, I don’t think about its success or failure. I’m on to the next one. If I can’t go on to the next one, I think I’ll just rust.”

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