Jaideep Ahlawat is drinking up the response to his velvety dance moves in Jewel Thief. The 45-year-old actor, typically known for playing hard-bitten cops and gangsters, or gentle brooders in films like Three of Us, cut a rug alongside Saif Ali Khan and Nikita Dutta in the groovily retro ‘Jaadu’ that broke the internet.
“The day it happened, the display of my phone malfunctioned,” Jaideep told The Hindu in an interview. “By the time the phone returned from the service centre, the clips had blown up. I had close to 1,000 messages on Instagram.”
The song currently has over 9 million views on YouTube. A majority of the comments are about Jaideep. There are ‘dancing Jaideep’ reels, and silly claims of AI use. “It feels great to be popularly validated like that,” says the Paatal Lok actor who was trained by choreographers Piyush Bhagat and Shazia Samji for the song.
Jaideep hails from Rohtak, Haryana. While his clips from ‘Jaadu’ have reached far and wide, his fans back home aren’t as gobsmacked, he says. “They already know I can dance,” nods the 6-f-tall actor who spent his younger days dancing at local weddings. “For them, it’s more like…. finally!”
Jaideep Ahlawat, Nikita Dutta in ‘Jewel Thief’
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This is a common enough experience for Jaideep: fans and admirers encountering him in person and getting pleasantly surprised. “They expect to meet Hathiram or Jadunath Maharaj or Naren Vyas. A lady, who had only seen Jaane Jaan, once remarked upon meeting me, ‘Oh, you have hair!’”
Another curious fan wanted him to remove his sunglasses to verify his eye colour. “He thought I’ll have scary pupil-less eyes like my character in Commando: A One Man Army.”
Jaideep says he does not know what ‘zaddy’—popular youth slang for an attractive older man—means. Explained, he deadpans, “Ah, it basically means I am old.”
In Jewel Thief, Jaideep plays a duplicitous crime boss who engages Saif Ali Khan’s services for an epic diamond heist. The film, releasing on Netflix on April 25, nods back to a glossier era of Hindi heist films, complete with foreign locales, cavernous hi-tech vaults, and those menacing laser beams that act as tripwires between burglar and loot. Nikita Dutta, Jaideep’s co-star, confirms they’re achieved using practical effects—without the attendant electric shock, of course.
“It’s quite funny to see those sequences being shot, especially if you are standing outside the set,” Jaideep chuckles.
Jaideep is, of course, a terrific action performer, memorably bruising up Ayushmann Khurrana in those scruffy close-combat brawls in An Action Hero. He promises similar electricity between him and Saif in Jewel Thief. “We fight a lot in the film,” Jaideep says. “During one sequence, we broke so many mirrors that Saif was like, ‘Is this our job now?’“
Spike Lee’s 2006 thriller Inside Man is Jaideep’s favourite heist film of all time (Incidentally, the Bollywood song ‘Chaiyya Chaiyya’ plays at the start of that film). “I love that movie,” Jaideep enthuses. “Its screenplay, its intricate editing…amazing stuff!”
Kunal Kapoor, Jaideep’s co-star, is a heist veteran, having played the hacker in 2011’s Don 2. Here, he’s a brutish detective on Saif’s scent. “A heist film always has to be ahead of its audience,” asserts Kunal, who, for once, isn’t playing an inert pacifier but a source of menace. “They think they know what is going to happen. But then it doesn’t —- and they are surprised. They should always go, ‘oh, I didn’t see that coming’.”
Nikita Dutta on her ‘Jewel Thief’ jaunt
I have grown up watching slick action thrillers from all over the world. In such films, there is always a female who is glamorous and whom you want to look at. So it was fun to be that! I love Money Heist and the Ocean’s franchise, especially its all-female spin-off Ocean’s 8. In heist movies, there is always a thin chance of you trying to act smart but looking foolish in the process. There have been recent Hollywood films where I went, “What are these guys doing! Of course, this is not possible!” So the trick is to engage the audience while also not looking silly.
Published – April 22, 2025 03:29 pm IST