Hrithik Roshan

He arrived in 2000 with Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai, a double role in his first leading part, and Hindi cinema had a new kind of star almost immediately: a leading man built around movement. Roshan is the rare Indian film actor whose dancing is not decoration on the performance but the main channel of it, and the industry spent the next decade writing sequences around that fact.

The 2000s are the run. Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) put him inside the defining family melodrama of the era. Koi... Mil Gaya (2003) handed him a character that turned into a franchise, and Krrish (2006) made it one of Hindi cinema's few durable superhero series, continued in Krrish 3 (2013) with a fourth film still listed. Around those sit the more interesting choices: Lakshya (2004), Jodhaa Akbar (2008) as the emperor Akbar, Guzaarish (2010), and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011), which is the best film he has ever been in.

Since then he has mostly worked at scale. War (2019) launched him as Kabir Dhaliwal, a character he has carried on through Tiger 3 (2023), War 2 (2025) and Alpha (2026), which is as close as Hindi film has come to a shared spy franchise. Vikram Vedha (2022) is the nearest thing to a genuine character part in the recent stretch, Super 30 (2019) is the biographical one, and Fighter (2024) is the most recent of the very large ones. He has won six Filmfare Awards, four of them for Best Actor, and has appeared repeatedly on Forbes India's Celebrity 100 since 2012.