Why was Shahid Kapoor written off as a leading man in his early career days?

Shahid Kapoor looked back on the limitations that he had to overcome in the early years of his career when there wasn’t much room to experiment. In an interview with a leading media house, he said that he was written off as a leading man despite delivering a hit debut because producers couldn’t imagine whom to cast opposite him.

Shahid said that because of his boyish appearance, which served him well in romantic comedies, producers found it difficult to find suitable female actors to cast opposite him because they all looked much older. He said that at that point, he’d take whatever came his way and that he tells his half-brother Ishaan Khatter that he has it much easier now.

“A lot of the times, they said, ‘Your movie worked, but whom do we cast you opposite?’ And they would name three or four big stars and say, ‘You’ll look like a kid next to them. You’re not manly enough. We need a massy hero’. I had to choose from whatever people were ready to offer me, even though I was a successful actor because the content that had been written at that time was made for older actors,” he said.

Shahid continued, “Hrithik came two years before me, then Vivek happened. So, I remember the year that I debuted and they told me, ‘You have no chance of succeeding because the industry only accepts one new hero every five years and now it has accepted two in three years’. I used to listen to all that and go to producers, who used to say, ‘We can’t cast anybody opposite you’.”