ਸੋਨੂੰ ਸੂਦਸੋਨੂੰ ਸੂਦ

Sonu Sood (born 30 July 1973) is an Indian actor, film producer, director and humanitarian from Moga in Punjab. Known across Hindi, Telugu and Tamil cinema for playing villains in films such as Arundhati and Dabangg, he won national admiration in 2020 for organising food, buses, trains and flights to take stranded migrant workers home during the Covid-19 lockdown.

Early life and education

Sood was born in Moga, a town in the Malwa region of Punjab. His father, Shakti Sagar Sood, ran a cloth shop, Bombay Cloth House, in the town's Main Bazar and organised langar outside it, while his mother, Saroj Bala Sood, was an English lecturer at DM College, Moga, who taught underprivileged students at home without charging them. The family home, Sood House, stood near the Dussehra Ground. He is one of three siblings: his elder sister Monika settled in the United States, and his youngest sister Malvika lives in Moga.

He studied at Sacred Heart School in Moga and then at Yeshwantrao Chavan College of Engineering in Nagpur, where he completed a B.Tech in electronics engineering. His sister has recalled that, as a student, he travelled home in unreserved train compartments to save money, sometimes sleeping on the floor in small spaces near the toilets. Those hard journeys later helped him understand, in a personal way, what migrant workers faced in 2020. After engineering he modelled in Delhi, then moved to Mumbai, where he has recalled living in a cramped room shared with about a dozen others while he looked for film work.

How did Sonu Sood break into films?

Sood broke into films in the south, starting with the Tamil films Kallazhagar and Nenjinile in 1999, followed by antagonist roles in Telugu cinema. His first Hindi film was Shaheed-E-Azam (2002), in which he played the freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. Wider notice came with Mani Ratnam's Yuva (2004), where he played the brother of Abhishek Bachchan's character, and with Aashiq Banaya Aapne (2005).

Breakthrough in Telugu, Tamil and Hindi cinema

Telugu cinema made him a familiar face first. Films such as Super (2005), Athadu (2005) and Ashok (2006) established him as a leading antagonist, and Arundhati (2009), in which he played Pasupathi, brought him the Andhra Pradesh State Nandi Award for Best Villain and the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor in Telugu. In Hindi cinema he had already played Rajkumar Sujamal in Jodhaa Akbar (2008), a performance that earned a Filmfare supporting actor nomination.

His biggest Hindi breakthrough was Dabangg (2010), where his lead villain Chhedi Singh, opposite Salman Khan, won the Apsara Award and the IIFA Award for the best performance in a negative role. He made his Kannada debut with Vishnuvardhana (2011), and his later work ranges across industries and languages: Dookudu (2011), Shootout at Wadala (2013), Happy New Year (2014), the Chinese film Kung Fu Yoga (2017), Simmba (2018), Kurukshetra (2019), in which he played Arjuna, and Samrat Prithviraj (2022), in which he played Chand Bardai. In 2021 he also appeared in the Punjabi music video Pagal Nahi Hona, sung by Sunanda Sharma.

Producing, television and a directorial debut

In July 2016 Sood set up Shakti Sagar Productions, named after his father. He hosted the reality show MTV Roadies in 2022 and 2023, and in June 2022 he launched a social media app called Explurger. His biggest step behind the camera came with Fateh, released on 10 January 2025: an action thriller about cybercrime, inspired by real incidents in cyberspace, in which he served as director, writer, producer and lead actor, alongside Jacqueline Fernandez, Vijay Raaz and Naseeruddin Shah. The film was produced by his own banner with Zee Studios, and it marks his directorial debut.

Helping migrants during Covid-19

When India went into a sudden nationwide lockdown on 24 March 2020, millions of migrant workers lost their incomes and, with trains and buses stopped, many set out to walk home. With his childhood friend Niti Goel, Sood began distributing food in March 2020, an effort the BBC reported grew from 500 meal and grocery packets to food and groceries for 45,000 people a day in slums, on roads and on highways. From 11 May he arranged hundreds of buses to take workers home, beginning after he met a group preparing to walk to Karnataka and secured the permissions needed in Maharashtra and Karnataka.

The work widened through his Ghar Bhejo effort: by early June 2020 he put the number of migrants he had helped reach home at 18,000. In July 2020 he arranged a chartered flight that brought more than 1,500 Indian students home from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan to Varanasi, and in August he helped 101 medical students stranded in Moscow reach Chennai. He also sent a tractor to a farming family whose daughters had been filmed ploughing a field, and launched a jobs platform, Pravasi Rojgar, to help migrant workers find work. In September 2020 the United Nations Development Programme gave him its SDG Special Humanitarian Action Award, the Punjab election commission named him a state icon, and in December 2020 his account of the year, I Am No Messiah, written with Meena K. Iyer, was published by Penguin India.

Charity work after the pandemic

That relief work became permanent through the Sood Charity Foundation, set up to help people regardless of their means. Its programmes have included free coaching for UPSC candidates from underprivileged backgrounds and SANKALP, a free coaching programme for law entrance tests such as CLAT and AILET. In February 2021 he launched Ilaaj India, a platform intended to connect needy patients with healthcare, and during the second Covid wave in 2021 he arranged oxygen plants and cylinders. In August 2021 the Delhi government named him brand ambassador of its Desh ke Mentor programme for school students, and after the 2023 train accident at Balasore in Odisha he launched a helpline for victims and their families.

Personal life

Sood married Sonali in 1996. She is from a Telugu family of Andhra Pradesh, and the couple have two sons, Ayaan and Ishant. His mother died in 2007 and his father in 2016. Members of his family have often said that his parents' habits, feeding people outside the shop and teaching children free of charge, are the direct source of his own instinct to help first and ask questions later.