Vicky Kaushalਵਿੱਕੀ ਕੌਸ਼ਲ

Vicky Kaushal was born on 16 May 1988 in a suburban chawl in Mumbai, the son of action director Sham Kaushal and Veena Kaushal. The family is Punjabi Hindu with ancestral roots in Hoshiarpur, in Punjab's Doaba region. As Kaushal himself has put it, although he grew up in Mumbai, his parents are originally from Hoshiarpur, and his mother made a mini Hoshiarpur within their home: the language, the food and the habits of the household were those of a typical Punjabi family.

A Punjabi childhood in a Mumbai chawl

Kaushal describes himself as a regular kid who was interested in studying, playing cricket and watching movies. His younger brother, Sunny, has also become an actor. His father had worked his way up in the film industry to become one of Hindi cinema's leading action directors, yet he was keen that his son should have a stable career away from show business. The connection to Punjab stayed practical as well as emotional: when Kaushal filmed the drama Zubaan, portions of it were shot at the family's ancestral home in Hoshiarpur, with the crew staying at the house through the schedule, and the actor has said the shoot brought back childhood memories.

Engineering, assisting, and the long wait

Following his father's wishes, Kaushal graduated with an engineering degree in electronics and telecommunications from Mumbai's Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Technology in 2009. On an industrial visit during his final year he realised he could not see himself in an office job, and he turned to acting: training at Kishore Namit Kapoor's academy, doing theatre with Manav Kaul's Aranya group and Naseeruddin Shah's Motley Productions, and spending two years auditioning without landing anything substantial. His break into the industry came behind the camera, as an assistant director to Anurag Kashyap on the two-part crime drama Gangs of Wasseypur (2012), followed by small roles in Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana (2012), the short film Geek Out (2013) and Bombay Velvet (2015).

Masaan and the breakthrough years

His first leading role was in Neeraj Ghaywan's independent drama Masaan (2015), screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. Kaushal played a young man from a low-income background in Varanasi straining for a better life, and the performance won him debut awards and marked him as a serious actor. He followed it with Kashyap's psychological thriller Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016), playing a disturbed police officer. The breakthrough came in 2018, with supporting roles in two of the year's biggest Hindi films: the spy drama Raazi and the biopic Sanju, where his turn as the hero's loyal friend won the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Why did Uri change everything?

In 2019 Kaushal played Major Vihaan Shergill in Uri: The Surgical Strike, based on the 2016 Uri attack. He gained muscle, followed a strict diet and went through five months of military training and mixed martial arts preparation, injuring his arm during filming. The film became the biggest hit of his career to that point, and his performance won the National Film Award for Best Actor, shared with Ayushmann Khurrana. Uri established him as a leading man who could carry a large film on his own, and its famous line of dialogue entered everyday speech across India.

Playing Punjab's own heroes

For an actor with Hoshiarpur roots, the most personal role followed in 2021: Shoojit Sircar's Sardar Udham, in which Kaushal played Udham Singh, the revolutionary from Sunam who avenged the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He lost over fifteen kilograms to play the younger Udham, and the performance was widely judged the finest of his career, winning the Filmfare Critics Award for Best Actor. In 2023 he played India's first field marshal, Sam Manekshaw, in Sam Bahadur, and took a Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor for his brief but much-praised role in Dunki the same year.

Recent work and honours

Kaushal has balanced the heavy biopics with popular successes: the romantic comedy Zara Hatke Zara Bachke (2023), the comedy Bad Newz (2024), and the historical action film Chhaava (2025), in which he portrayed the Maratha ruler Sambhaji and which became the highest-grossing release of his career. In all, he holds a National Film Award and three Filmfare Awards, and appeared in Forbes India's Celebrity 100 list in 2019. He married the actor Katrina Kaif in 2021, and the couple have a son. For Punjabi audiences, his story has a particular pull: a boy raised in a Mumbai chawl, in a home run like a Hoshiarpur household, who grew up to play Udham Singh on screen.