In late January, actor Boman Irani gave a speech at the British Parliament and at the Oxford University, where he was also felicitated. Looking back at the experience, the actor, who was at the Indo-UK Summit with India’s International Movement to Unite Nations (IIMUN), calls London “extraordinary”.

“I was awestruck entering the UK Parliament. People from the House of Lords and House of Commons spoke too. I spoke about our country and the impact it has on the rest of the world, whether it’s our culture, customs, festivals or food, and how we must look at the world through an Indian lens,” Irani says.

Does he think he inspired the English with his wisdom? “I don’t know if I inspired them. The endeavour was to impress youngsters and to remind each other that we are ambassadors of India, its values and customs. The British diaspora was very keen to hear what we had to say,” he adds.

Despite his achievements and spending two decades in the Hindi film industry, Irani refuses to call himself a “senior actor”. He says, “When you say that, everybody asks ‘are you trying to retire?’ I am still discovering myself. I’m debuting as a director at 64. Who does that?”

The Dunki (2023) actor got into films at 44 and never looked back. Calling it the perfect timing, he believes that even if he took up acting early, he wouldn’t have played a “hero”. “Imagine I joined the industry at 24, you think I could have managed to look like a hero? No!,” he explains.

“[But] It definitely gave me a chance to do complex characters that I could mould and give different looks to— make them bald or long haired, much older or younger,” the actor opines.

This has given him a repertoire of unique and varied characters in films like Lakshya (2004), Veer-Zaara (2004), Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), the Don franchise. “It doesn’t matter whether you play 10 police officers. I do not judge the character by the profession. I judge him by his world view, temperament, flaws,” Irani ends.