'Came from comfortable privilege where paycheck wasn't crucial,' says Imran Khan as he opens up on his decision to take sabbatical - EXCLUSIVE

In a crisp light blue shirt teamed with beige pants, Imran gets up while having lunch to greet us as we visit his workplace for this interview. It's been an 11-year sabbatical from the movies, but that perhaps could also be called a time of healing for him. He's taken some bold steps in the last few years — be it stepping back from movies for the lack of anything exciting or from a marriage. But today, as I ask him how he's doing, he responds with a smile, "Getting better each day."

As we sat down for an hour-long chat, it all began with him talking about why he decided to stop working. Of course, it was also his journey with mental health, but opening up on it as a creative decision, Imran says, "To really truthfully address this, one has to look back at the reason that I stopped doing work in the first place, which was that one has a certain understanding of how the work is done. You do work to enrich yourself financially. You do work to build your status socially, to build your brand value — whatever the reasons are, and they are measurable metrics certainly. While they are valid metrics in a lot of ways, I think the weightage on those metrics started to swing too far away."




He added further, "The truth of cinema, movie making, is that what drives a bunch of people to come together and say, 'Guys, let's all put on costumes and we'll make believe.' You're doing it because it's fun. I started to really consider this and re-evaluate this way back in 2015 when my daughter was born, just shortly before I started shooting 'Katti Batti'. I started to take a bit of time to step back around that time because I was, on the one hand, feeling like I wanted to spend time with my daughter and started to think why I'm doing the work that I'm doing."

The 'Jaane Tu...Ya Jaane Na' actor further added that because he was at a privileged position, the decision became easier. He added, "Speaking purely for myself, from sitting in a place of very comfortable privilege. From a very young age, I was fortunate enough that I was making good money in movies. I was financially very secure, very comfortable — I still am, so I was not in a position where a paycheck was crucial or relevant. I had more than enough to live comfortably. So that is not a driving factor for employment. For someone else, certainly it is, but not for me. I also, by that point, had had enough of a taste of it to understand that stardom did not excite me. Whatever that ephemeral thing is, the excitement of celebrity or fame, is not interesting or intoxicating for me."

He also credited the people in his family, who've been stalwarts of cinema — be it his grandfather Nasir Hussain or uncles Mansoor Khan and Aamir Khan — for the same. "I grew up surrounded by people who practiced the craft but practiced the craft for love and placed value on that. They respected the craft and practiced it with integrity. What was taught to me was that you put everything that you have into it, and you do it truthfully and you do it with authenticity. And the success — either stardom, fame, money, whatever external markers of success may be — they are never promised or guaranteed. If someone is paying you to do this thing which you love, it's a blessing," he expressed.

WATCH the full interview here:



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