New Delhi: Actor Amol Parashar knows what it’s like to have just Rs 28 in his bank account and be ignored by the industry. So he’s not letting his new heartthrob status go to his head after his two back-to-back OTT hits, Gram Chikitsalay and Kull: The Legacy of the Raisingghs.
“Suddenly you are hot, or a national crush. I mean, at this point I have lost count of how many national crushes there are. It changes very quickly,” said Parashar dryly.
Parashar isn’t new to streaming shows, but in the space of one week, he’s gone from cult-favourite sidekick to star of the show. As an idealistic city-bred doctor who moves to a village in Gram Chikitsalay, and a dissipated, coke-snorting prince in Kull, he’s delivered two wildly different performances. What they have in common is that both shot to the top of Ormax’s OTT viewership list on their week of release and a big chunk of the credit went to his acting—and looks. Fans are now saying if their doctor looks like Gram Chikitsalay’s wide-eyed Prabhat Sinha, they would happily fall sick. Even the misogynistic, entitled bad-boy energy of Kull’s frequently shirtless Abhimanyu has become a guilty pleasure of sorts.
While his DMs are overflowing with compliments and thirsty messages and he’s been sharing the glowing reviews on social media, Parashar is taking it all with a pinch of salt.
“My honest feeling is let the noise settle and see what will it lead to after three-four months,” he said.
An IIT graduate, it’s been a slow and unsteady trajectory for him during his 15 years in the entertainment industry. It was only after the hit comedy-drama TVF Tripling (2016), where he played one of the three titular siblings, that he started earning a fan following. This was followed by small yet memorable roles like Bhagat Singh in the acclaimed Sardar Udham (2021), as well as a lead in the more forgettable Sweet Dreams (2025). But his true moment in the spotlight has only come with these two series. Reports speculating that he’s dating actor Konkona Sen Sharma also have admirers in a tizzy although he’s tight-lipped about his personal life.
“Amol Parashar is sooooo hot man also he’s dating Konkona omg,” said one fan on X. “When did Amol Parashar get so hot and why did no one tell me?????” said another. Some have even compared him to Pakistani heartthrob Fawad Khan.
But the OTT space isn’t the only platform he’s owning at the moment. His live storytelling show Besharam Aadmi, which travelled to Bengaluru after a houseful run in Mumbai, is also the talk of the town.
“Since Amol has an avid interest in writing, he is able to read between the lines—the gaps and pauses in the script—and breathe life into the characters he plays,” said actor, writer, and close friend Puneet Batra. “I’ve seen his growth, sincerity, and nuances in the past seven years.”
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Six-pack prince to ‘fries-eating’ doctor
Transforming into the hedonistic Abhimanyu and then rapidly into the helpful Dr Prabhat demanded not just different acting skills but different diets.
Abhimanyu, the youngest of the dysfunctional Raisinggh siblings in Kull, is a tattooed, drug-addled menace who tests everyone’s patience. He is introduced trying to charm the family hotel’s receptionist. When she tells him the place is booked out, he replies: “Then keep me in your room. We’ll bitch about the owners of the hotel while cuddling at night.”
Tattooed, taut, and twitchy, Abhimanyu is played to perfection by Parashar. His constantly darting glances convey not just shiftiness but also his abandonment issues and mistrust of everyone. It often comes out as cruelty. At his father’s funeral, he elbows a cousin and says: “Distant relatives and dogs should be at the back.”
“I think there are very few characters that are written deranged. Once the shoot was over, I got messages from the creative team that they had started to feel bad for my character. But on paper, that was not the feeling—he was just a repulsive man,” said Parashar.
It wasn’t Parashar’s first time working with producer Ekta Kapoor, who cast him in Kull. She’d earlier noticed him in the 2020 film Dolly Kitty Aur Woh Chamakte Sitare, where he played Osmaan Ansari, a delivery boy who has an affair with a married woman, played by Konkona Sen Sharma.
“She has always shown faith in me. I’m sure there might have been people who said, ‘Why Amol? This kind of role is not something he has done.’ And still she decided to go ahead with me,” he said.
Straight off Kull, he started preparing for the role of Dr Prabhat in Gram Chikitsalay. He’s virtuous to a fault, bar his vice of collecting shoes, much to the amusement of his dispensary ward boy Gobind (Akash Makhija). The role also needed a body transformation.
“When the director Rahul [Pandey] met me, I was in shape for Kull, with a lean physique. He said, ‘I want Prabhat to look like he has been pulling all-nighters, and also eats fries’. So, I gained back weight,” said Parashar.
Where Abhimanyu is unruly and toxic, Prabhat is an empathetic do-gooder.
“Dr Prabhat is a good listener and deals with life in a very calm manner. Parashar added to that because even in real life, he is like that,” said Pandey.
But the parallels go even deeper. Like Prabhat, Parashar too left a mainstream job to pursue an inner calling.
The long road to OTT success
Back in 2003, Delhi boy Amol Parashar was on the kind of track most Indian parents dream of. He earned an All India Rank of 238 in the IIT-JEE and went on to study mechanical engineering at IIT Delhi. Everything went to plan for a while. He graduated and got a campus placement at the consulting firm ZS Associates in Pune.
But when performing in college plays, he realised acting was his calling. Being a straitlaced ‘Sharma ji ka beta’ wasn’t enough anymore. In 2008, he finally quit his job.
“I wanted to quit on 15 August to make a point about being free from corporate life. But I eventually quit earlier, on the 4th of July, and told myself it is still symbolic since my company was a US-based one, and it is their day of freedom,” said Parashar with his signature cheekiness.
Overriding his parents’ apprehensions, he headed to Mumbai. His first stint was at Thespo, a festival at the Prithvi theatre, where he formed a group, performed in plays, and turned up for every audition he could.
“You keep getting all kinds of advice—become an assistant director on some film. Or a casting director. All I wanted was to act and be around artists. If I wanted money, I would have stuck to my job,” he said. “The last 15 years for me have been a game of persistence and curiosity.”
His first film role was in Rocket Singh: Salesman of the Year (2009), playing the wealthy, bespectacled classmate Sai who advises Ranbir Kapoor’s Rocket Singh to do an MBA. He had limited screentime but is full of memories about the experience, from Yash Chopra handing him a coconut during a pooja held on set to moments where he revealed how green he was.
“I had no idea if I could go to the washroom without asking. Then I made the fatal mistake of using the washroom with my mic on,” he said, laughing. “I even asked the script supervisor, will we get food on set?”
Small roles in films like Babloo Happy Hai (2014) and the thriller Traffic (2016) followed, but simply staying afloat was difficult at times.
“My parents were worried, and even upset once when my mother figured out that I had no money and was not stepping out because of that. My bank balance was Rs 28. Then, I remembered I was supposed to get a cheque of Rs 7,000, and that eventually helped,” said Parashar.
There was also a harrowing string of promising projects getting shelved. A UTV film he had signed, to be directed by Delhi Belly’s Akshat Verma, was cancelled two days before shooting was to begin. A play where he was cast as young Rishi Kapoor fell through. A web series with Anurag Kashyap’s Phantom Films bit the dust when the lead actor backed out.
It was during this slump that Tripling came along. Parashar didn’t sign it until it was greenlit to the T. But this time, fortune smiled at the actor, and the show became an instant success. His role as Chitwan, the sometimes infuriatingly easygoing younger sibling on a road trip, became a cult classic in the nascent days of OTT. He returned for two more seasons, and by the end, the character had grown up. So had Parashar, who won multiple awards for the role, including Power Performer of the year at IWM India Awards 2019.
“His transformation from the kooky, wanton playboy from the first season to the reluctant adult is a thud to the chest of emotion that the series unloads in its last two episodes,” wrote reviewer Manik Sharma.
Another standout performance was as Bhagat Singh in Sardar Udham. In the movie, Singh is shown not as bombastic and hypermasculine but as meditative, self-reflexive, and eager to learn. He even has a sense of humour.
When a comrade asks what he’ll do once India is free, Bhagat Singh replies: “I will watch a Charlie Chaplin movie, buy a bottle of expensive British wine, and do a ballroom dance with an English lady.”
Parashar held his own among the many cinematic Bhagat Singhs before him, from Bobby Deol to Ajay Devgn.
“Amol brought out so many aspects of the character. He went through his letters and read everything he could on the freedom fighter, even though it was not a big role. We see the thinker, the 23-year-old who was revolutionary. He is still a kid in a way, and Amol brings that out,” said Puneet Batra.
Now, even as he rides an OTT high, Parashar is returning to his theatre roots.
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Back on stage
There was a time early in his career that Parashar was performing in as many as four plays a week in Prithvi theatre.
“People started joking that it’s Amol Parashar week at Prithvi,” he recalled.
He’s kept that love of the stage alive. After Tripling, he performed Not So Casual Sex, a spoken-word piece based on a story by Hindi novelist Divya Prakash Dubey. It was released online on Valentine’s Day 2020 and went viral. The video now has 15 million views.
Now, he’s back with Besharam Aadmi, an innovative one-man play written by Vijay Ashok Sharma, which Parashar helped mould.
“The joy of connecting to a large audience through a small story gave me confidence to create something like Besharam Aadmi, and also gave insight into the kind of stories people are starved for,” said Parashar.
At its core, the 75-minute show is about sex, shame, and how men are taught to think about gender and intimacy. It begins with an awkward moment where his partner’s lingerie is accidentally exposed in front of his parents and unfolds into a funny, honest reflection on sexuality, discomfort, and relationships. It manages to be profound yet light-hearted.
“I watched his show in Bangalore, and I was thoroughly impressed. In all these years after college, I could see his growth, and yet the way he looks at life hasn’t changed. That’s helped us stay friends even two decades later,” said Avijit Batra, who’s known Parashar since his momo-eating days in IIT.
Parashar has two upcoming releases—a film with A Suitable Boy actor Tanya Maniktala and a comedy movie, Nausikhiya—but the dates are not set yet. For now, he’s more focused on the stage, and says he wants to keep TV commitments light.
“I want to create new solo shows every year or two, and eventually my fantasy, in five years, is to have a week-long Amol Parashar live festival where I perform a different piece every day,” he said. “I want to use my acting and writing skills to create shows, films, and characters that shock and surprise people.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
Konkona has taken after her mother, the notorious Aparna Sen. No wonder she likes toyboys. Seems like a mother-daughter thing.
Also, it must be noted here that both of them are avowed admirers of Ms. Mamata Banerjee.
Yes the struggle is real . Very well written and explained the struggle n hardwork of amol ,n that national crush thing is so true what he said.
All the best to him …n so happy to hear about the upcoming films waiting to see him ruling the hearts with his talent…