“I have never felt so much love,” says Sidhant Gupta, basking in the glory of his recent release, Jubilee. The actor, who turned 34 last week, adds, “[The birthday] was different. Suddenly, life has meaning,” he muses.

Does that mean he’s just come off a period of dormancy, maybe even an existential crisis? “I was [going through one] before the lockdown,” he confesses.

Like many, Gupta’s life came to a ‘standstill’ during the pandemic. “I took a pause and wondered, ‘Why am I blaming the whole world for my choice to be an actor?’” he recalls, adding that this realization helped him take his “life’s steering wheel” in his own hands. “You have to find the reason why you want to do this work and it has to go beyond everything. This birthday is when it all felt very meaningful,” he says.

The Inside Edge actor’s turn as a penniless, aspiring filmmaker in Jubilee caught everyone’s attention, with some even billing him a star in the making. The actor says that although he has been active for over a decade now, he, too, “discovered” himself not too long ago. “I thank God I didn’t give up. Thank God, I didn’t know how to give up,” he shares.

What does he mean by giving up? “There are moments where you feel that nothing is going your way. Like after television, when I wanted to just move away from it because I wasn’t really happy. I did films such as Bhoomi (2017) and nothing was going my way. I didn’t have any work, except TV, where you don’t have space to create,” Gupta ends.