Ali Fazal prioritises meaningful stories over blockbusters

Ali Fazal is at a point in his career where the choices he makes carry a different kind of weight, and he is no longer making them for the reasons he once did. In a candid conversation with Elle India, the actor opened up about the creative philosophy guiding his work now, a deliberate shift away from commercial instincts and toward projects that leave a genuine mark.
He described what worries him most as a performer with characteristic directness. “Mostly the feeling that you’ve made less of a difference in people’s lives,” he said. It is the kind of answer that says everything about how far his priorities have moved from where they began.
Fazal said he now gravitates toward roles that have “less relevance and more resonance”, a distinction that defines much of his current thinking about both his Bollywood and Hollywood career. He wants the work to reflect the ambition and humanity that define him as a person, not simply as an actor building a brand.
His upcoming film Raakh, a crime thriller in which he plays a police officer investigating a case rooted in real historical events from 1970s Delhi, served as the central example in his conversation. “Sometimes you’re part of things that work, and that’s wonderful because we all need appreciation to move forward,” he said. “But once in a while, there are projects that actually begin conversations. They come at a time when society perhaps needs them or needs reminding that, sadly, not much has changed fifty years later. That’s what Raakh has done. It has humbled me.”
He was equally candid about how his decision-making process has changed. “Earlier, I’d jump into whatever came my way because I had to. Today, I can afford patience.” That patience is now applied most rigorously to the screenplay itself, which he described as the first and most important filter. “The punctuation in a screenplay tells you whether it’s going to be good or bad,” he said, adding with a self-aware joke: “I’m not some A-list star who’s staying away from genres because they’ll spoil my image. I’ve probably stayed away from bad scripts more than genres.”
His early career also featured in the conversation. He credited Always Kabhi Kabhi, a film that performed modestly at the box office, with teaching him the grammar of cinema. The film introduced him to Shah Rukh Khan, who produced it, and whom Fazal described as “one of the best artists we have.”
On Mirzapur: The Film, which brings the streaming universe to theatres, Fazal called it “a giant experiment,” and on his character Guddu Pandit, he said what has stayed with him is not the violence but the innocence beneath it.
Away from acting, he and his wife Richa Chadha are building Pushing Buttons Studios, their independent production company aimed at supporting original storytelling. Asked to describe his journey in a single word, Fazal chose “relentless.” It is the right word for a career that is now defined not by the roles he has taken but by the ones he has chosen to wait for.