4 min readMumbaiJun 11, 2026 11:39 AM IST
Shahid Kapoor has had a couple of misfires recently, with Vishal Bhardwaj’s action thriller O’ Romeo this year and Rosshan Andrrews’ cop drama Deva last year. He’ll next star in Homi Adajania’s romantic comedy Cocktail 2 alongside Rashmika Mandanna and Kriti Sanon. The actor recently confessed that he’s begun to rely less on his instinct, and has looped in his management team for more informed decisions on the projects he picks going forward.
‘Insisting on narrations with my team now’
“When you work for so long, you expect to get it right more. But that’s now how it works. How many years you’ve worked has nothing to do with it,” confessed Shahid, who made his acting debut 23 years ago with Ken Ghosh’s hit rom-com Ishq Vishk in 2003. “Films are extremely unpredictable. Being an actor, you don’t have control over how it does. You have some control, but not full control over even what you do as an actor. It’s the director has to decide the frame,” he added.
This has prompted Shahid to now not go completely by his instinct while choosing projects, and instead consult his team at every step. “One thing I’ve started telling my team now is that maybe I should not be deciding on my scripts. Maybe I know exactly what to do in front of the camera, but maybe I don’t know which films to choose or my criteria might be driven by a pure artistic instinct, and that might not land,” he argued.
“So, now I actually insist on narrations not alone. I used to always do them alone, but I’ve changed that. It’s a big change that has happened in my life after these two films. I want three more people in the room now, so that I’m not the only one imagining it a certain way,” added the actor. Shahid is also taking his time to pick projects now, and has only season 2 of Raj & DK’s Prime Video India crime thriller show Farzi in the pipeline after Cocktail 2.
Not mixing art with commercial anymore
Shahid also acknowledged the fact that stars like him live in a bubble, and thus may not be aware of the pulse of the audience at all times. “We’re going through a big churn. If a rough patch has come and we’ve to figure it out a little bit, it’s an opportunity to go back to the basics, not be so sure of yourself, and start learning,” he added.
Shahid admitted that he’s tried his best to mix art with commerce, and tried to make the offbeat films more commercial and vice-versa, but he feels that blend is not natural. “I’ve finally told myself to stop trying to bring these two things together because they’re tearing you apart. If you want to do commercial stuff, then submit to it. Don’t try and bring logic and a hundred other things into that. And if you want to do something experimental, then just do that and don’t expect it to give you that scale and size as far as the commerce is concerned,” he said.
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“I’ve always been a little whimsical and dreamy that it would happen. It’s happened a couple of times, but more often than not, it doesn’t happen,” admitted Shahid. The actor didn’t charge any fee for his central performance in Vishal Bhardwaj’s 2014 crime drama Haider, which became one of his most critically acclaimed films yet. But their latest collaboration, O’Romeo, failed to have a similar effect earlier this year.
