Source: Telegraph India
Date: Jan 5, 2007
By Sneha Hazarika
The success stories of puppy fat and pimply romance are gone. It’s the more mature guys who are making the blood rush now.
Hrithik Roshan, Akshaye Khanna, Ajay Devgan, Abhishek Bachchan, Akshay Kumar, Shiney Ahuja, John Abraham and Saif Ali Khan Gone are the days when we used to watch ‘puppy-love’ movies like Bobby, Prem Rog or Love 86 with teenage lead pairs singing and running around the trees.
The focus from lead actors in their late teens or early 20s has shifted to more mature looking heroes and heroines in their 30s. And all those Rishi Kapoors and Kumar Gauravs with puppy fat and chubby cheeks have given way to more seriously ‘men’ lookers like Hrithik Roshans and Abhishek Bachchans. And even these superstars of the transition period have earned their place in the sun after plenty of struggle. In other words, by crossing the lean phase of their 20s! In 2000, when 26-year-old Hrithik Roshan blazed up the Indian screens with Kaho Naa...Pyaar Hai, critics and audiences alike felt that a new star was born.
But when his releases thereafter weren’t received as positively, he was quickly written off as a one-film wonder. The success of Koi...Mil Gaya in 2003 made his detractors say that the light-eyed actor only excels in his dad Rakesh Roshan’s films.
But 2006 has changed all that. Krissh, Dhoom: 2 and the multicrore deal with Adlabs has pushed Hrithik to the Most Wanted league. And he is also now being considered a versatile actor who excels both in positive and negative roles.
Critics have somersaulted and now say that it was only Hrithik who could have made “two scriptless films” reach the target of over Rs 100 crore in the year gone by. The actor, now all of 33 years, is being christened “the most valuable person in the industry” and “the sexiest man alive”. For Hrithik Roshan, the 30s have obviously been a magic phase