There’s a version of Bhuvan Bam that still exists somewhere on the internet, hunched over a phone in a small room, doing all the voices, editing his own footage, uploading at odd hours, and hoping someone somewhere finds it funny. That version didn’t disappear. It just got a little louder.
This week, on the back of fresh interviews and updates flowing in around Kuku Ki Kundali, Bam has been talking. Really talking. Not the polished, PR-approved talking that most actors do when a film is being positioned. The kind where you can actually feel the person behind the words.
And what comes through, more than anything, is that this Bollywood debut genuinely means something to him.
Kuku Ki Kundali is a Dharma Productions film, directed by Sharan Sharma, who you might know from Gunjan Saxena and the more recent Mr and Mrs Mahi. It’s described as a quirky romantic comedy. Bam is the lead. Wamiqa Gabbi is opposite him. And on paper, sure, it sounds like a fun mainstream outing. But listen to how Bam talks about it and you start to understand it’s a lot more personal than the logline suggests.
He called it a personal milestone. Said it feels surreal. And then, in that offhand way he has, admitted something that I think landed harder than he intended. He never imagined himself as a romantic lead. Never wrote himself into that story. “If I had myself written something like it, I couldn’t have imagined myself doing it all,” he said. Which is a slightly tangled sentence but you know exactly what he means. You feel it. The surprise of discovering you’re capable of something you never thought to want.
There’s something about that particular kind of revelation. Not the one where you work toward a goal and achieve it, but the one where someone hands you a script and says, what if this, and you say okay fine, and then somewhere in the middle of it you realise your own edges have shifted.
He showed up to set with jitters. Said so himself. Which, given his resume, is a little funny on the surface. We’re talking about a man who has performed as multiple characters simultaneously on camera for years, who carried an entire web series on his back with Dhindora, who has more followers than most people have ever spoken to in a lifetime. And he was nervous. Not the false-modesty nervous. The real kind, the kind that lives in the stomach.
But he also said he’d waited his whole life for this moment. Those two things are not contradictory. They’re exactly what it looks like when something actually matters.
After over a month of shooting, his read on the industry has softened in an interesting way. He came in, presumably, with the outsider’s sense that Bollywood runs on image, on facades, on everyone pretending to be more sorted than they are. What he found was different. People just trying to make something good, he said. Everyone there to prove themselves. Not performing confidence, actually chasing something. That surprised him, clearly. It didn’t surprise me, exactly, but it’s a good thing to find out firsthand.
Sharan Sharma feels like the right person to bring Bam into this world. His films have a warmth to them that doesn’t tip into sentimentality. They trust the audience. They give their characters room to be uncertain, awkward, quietly brave. If he’s applying that same approach here, Kuku Ki Kundali might end up being something more interesting than its genre description suggests.
Wamiqa Gabbi as his co-lead is a smart piece of casting. She’s one of those actors who makes a scene feel inhabited rather than performed. Put her next to someone like Bam, who works very naturally with emotional texture, and there’s potential there that goes beyond just chemistry.
Elsewhere, his plate is full in a way that would exhaust most people. The Revolutionaries, his upcoming web series with Nikkhil Advani, recently finished filming. He co-stars with Rohit Saraf and Pratibha Ranta, and working under a director’s vision after years of running his own creative show required, in his words, a lot of unlearning. That’s a hard thing to do. Harder than it sounds. The instinct to control, to default to what you know works, is strong. That he’s actively dismantling some of that says more about his headspace right now than any career announcement.
Dhindora Season 2 is officially confirmed too, which will feel like coming home after a long trip. And despite everything pulling him in every direction, he was firm about one thing this week. He’s not stopping writing. If he did, he said, he’d feel bored and frustrated. That landed. Because you know when someone says something like that and means it in the structural sense, not the hobby sense. Writing isn’t what Bhuvan Bam does on the side. It’s what holds the whole thing together.
Honestly, the most compelling thing about where he is right now is the combination. The nervousness and the readiness. The willingness to unlearn and the refusal to stop being himself. Most people in his position would be smoothing out the edges, making themselves more palatable, more industry-shaped. He’s doing the opposite. Walking into rooms he’s never been in before, and bringing the whole, unedited version of himself along.
Kuku Ki Kundali hasn’t released yet. We don’t know what it becomes. But the person making it seems to already know exactly why it matters.
That’s usually a good sign.
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Sana has been covering film, fame, and everything in between for over a decade. From red carpets to rehab rumors, she brings nuance, wit, and an insider’s edge to every story. When she’s not reporting, she’s probably watching Koffee With Karan reruns or doom-scrolling celebrity IG feeds.
