Kartik Aaryan: The Outsider Who Built an Audience
Kartik Aaryan came from Gwalior with no film connections. His path from auditions to a National Award shows how audience goodwill builds a star.
Some stars are launched by studios. Kartik Aaryan's rise reads differently: auditions, a long wait, a monologue that audiences remembered, and a run of films that people kept paying to see. This piece uses his Wikipedia biography to trace that audience-led path, and it separates what the record shows from what it does not.
Starting without connections
Aaryan was born Kartik Tiwari in Gwalior in 1990 to two doctors. According to his biography, he studied biotechnology engineering in Mumbai while secretly wanting to act, travelling two hours to auditions and skipping classes. After three years of unsuccessful auditions he took an acting course, and he told his parents about his plan only after signing his first film. At his mother's insistence he finished his engineering degree after his debut.
He found the casting call for Luv Ranjan's Pyaar Ka Punchnama (2011) on Facebook and secured the role after auditioning for six months. With limited money, he shared an apartment with 12 other aspiring actors and earned by cooking for them.
The monologue
In Pyaar Ka Punchnama his character delivered a four-minute monologue that was among the lengthiest single shots in a Hindi film to that point, and the film became a sleeper hit. In the 2015 sequel he delivered an even longer one, seven minutes. The sequel earned over Rs 88 crore against a Rs 22 crore budget, and he won a Stardust Award for Best Actor in a Comic Role.
Between those two films he had setbacks. Akaash Vani (2013) and Kaanchi (2014) did not perform well, which, the biography says, led him to question his career prospects.
Breakthrough and bombs
His biggest success to that point came with Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety (2018), which earned Rs 150 crore. Luka Chuppi and Pati Patni Aur Woh followed in 2019, each grossing over Rs 100 crore worldwide.
The record also contains failures. Love Aaj Kal (2020) was a box-office bomb. Shehzada (2023) was a critical and commercial failure, and when its producers faced a financial crisis, the biography says he returned his salary and was credited as a producer. He was also dropped from Dostana 2 after 20 days of filming, which Bollywood Hungama attributed to creative differences with Karan Johar and his producers.
The reinvention
He then widened his range. For Freddy (2022) he gained 14 kg to play a socially awkward dentist, and for Chandu Champion (2024) he trained in swimming and boxing. Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 (2022) earned over Rs 267 crore, and Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 (2024) earned Rs 417 crore worldwide, which the biography lists as his highest-grossing release.
Chandu Champion won him a Filmfare Award for Best Actor and the National Film Award for Best Actor, shared with Mammootty for Bramayugam. He also won the IIFA Award for Best Actor for the third Bhool Bhulaiyaa.
What audiences and critics say
The record is not uniformly warm. Reviewers criticised the treatment of women in his early comedies, and the biography quotes WION's Shomini Sen on what she called the "Kartik Aaryan brand of feminism", a pattern she saw as problematic. Aaryan has said that portraying women as negative characters does not amount to misogyny, just as casting men as villains does not amount to misandry.
Off screen, he endorses brands including Hummel, Emami and Manyavar. He donated Rs 1 crore to the PM CARES Fund in March 2020, and the biography adds a Rs 1 crore donation to Assam flood relief in 2026. He also says he does not speak about his relationships in the media.
What we could not confirm
The biography documents box office, awards and endorsements. It does not contain fan-club numbers, social media counts or audience surveys, so we cannot say how large his fan following is. Box-office totals are converted from the biography's figures and were not verified against producer statements.
Sources
*Cover photo: Segolene Liger, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).*