By Ayesha Khan 
Mumbai, May 8: Vidya Balan cried watching an old film last night. Not the ugly, loud kind of crying. The quiet kind. The kind where you are not sure when it started.
The film was The Last Tenant. One of Irrfan Khan’s earlier works, not particularly famous, not the one people usually mention when they talk about him. She posted about it on Instagram this morning and within hours half of Bollywood had something to say about it.
She called him the most natural actor she had ever worked with.
Just that. No long speech, no carefully worded tribute. Just that one line and the look on her face in the video that made it clear she meant every word of it.
Vidya Balan on Irrfan Khan: A Colleague Like No Other
Most people forget that Vidya and Irrfan actually worked together. Haasil, 2003, directed by Tigmanshu Dhulia. Campus love story meets political thriller, the kind of film that did not make a hundred crores but stayed with the people who saw it.
Irrfan played Ranvijay Singh in that film. Villain, technically. But the kind of villain you cannot take your eyes off. The kind where you know he is the bad guy and you are still quietly rooting for him because something about the way he carries himself just gets under your skin.
Vidya was there for that. She shared scenes with him. She watched from a few feet away as he did what he did, and apparently what he did never quite left her.
Twenty-something years later she sits down to watch an older, quieter film of his and needs to post about it at nine in the morning. That is what staying power looks like.
Why Irrfan Khan Still Feels Impossible to Replace
Here is the honest truth about Irrfan Khan that people who loved his work will understand immediately.
He did not look like he was acting.
That sounds simple. It is not. Most actors, even very good ones, you can see them working. You can see the moment they decide to react. You can see them choosing the emotion. Nothing wrong with that, some of the greatest performances in cinema history work exactly that way.
Irrfan was different. With him you watched and you thought, this person is just living. Whatever is happening on screen is just happening to him and he is dealing with it the way a real person would deal with it. Messily, quietly, without telegraphing anything.
Watch the scene in Lunchbox where he reads one of Nimrat Kaur’s letters for the first time. He does almost nothing. A flicker somewhere around his eyes. A small pause before he puts the box away. That is it. And somehow it destroys you.
That is the thing Vidya is talking about. It cannot be taught. Very few people have it. He had it in abundance and he is gone and there is no replacing it.
Fifty Three
He was 53 when he died. April 29, 2020. Mumbai. The whole country was already locked down so there were no crowds outside the hospital, no one lining the streets. Just his family and a quietness that felt wrong for someone that large.
He had known for two years by then. Diagnosed with a neuroendocrine tumour back in 2018, told the world himself in a post that was so honest and so free of self-pity that people did not quite know how to respond to it. He kept working through it. Flew to London for treatment, came back, finished Angrezi Medium while he was still unwell.
That film came out in March 2020. The lockdown hit days later. Most of the country never got to watch it in theatres. He died the following month without knowing how it landed.
There is something specifically sad about that. A man who worked his whole life, who finally got to a place where every film he made was an event, and his last one got swallowed by a pandemic.
What Vidya Actually Said
She was not performing grief in the video. That is the thing about it that people responded to.
She looked like someone who had just watched something and needed to tell someone about it. Slightly undone. Speaking in the way you speak to a friend, not to a camera. She talked about how watching him made her feel, about the specific quality he had that she had never seen quite replicated, about what it is like to watch the work of someone who is no longer here.
The comments filled up fast. Other actors. Directors. Regular people who had never been anywhere near a film set but knew exactly what she was talking about because they had felt it too, sitting in a theatre or on a couch somewhere, watching Piku or Hindi Medium or The Namesake, feeling like they were watching a real person go through real things.
Still Felt Everywhere
Five years since he died and Bollywood still has not filled the gap. People do not say it out loud very often because it sounds like giving up, but if you talk to directors quietly they will tell you. Certain scripts get adjusted. Certain roles get softened or rethought entirely because the actor they were built for in their heads does not exist anymore.
That is a strange thing to carry around the industry. The ghost of what someone could have done with something.
Vidya Balan is not a person given to public emotion without reason. She is sharp, measured, someone who has navigated Hindi cinema for over two decades without losing her footing or her honesty. When she posts a video looking like that and says what she said, it is not a PR move. It is not timed to anything.
She watched a film. She missed her colleague. She said so.
And for a few minutes this morning, scrolling through that post, a lot of people missed him too.
Stay ahead with Hindustan Herald — bringing you trusted news, sharp analysis, and stories that matter across Politics, Business, Technology, Sports, Entertainment, Lifestyle, and more.
Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube, and join our Telegram community @hindustanherald for real-time updates.
Covers films, television, streaming, and celebrity culture with a focus on storytelling trends.
- Ayesha Khan
- Ayesha Khan
- Ayesha Khan
- Ayesha Khan
