You must be living under a rock if you have not heard about the 'King of Slow Motion'. Well, I was. Having not followed reality shows much, I had missed the entire phase where this dancing phenomenon burst onto the stage of Indian television. I came across Raghav Juyal for the first time on YouTube where clips of Dance Plus, a dance reality show were going viral. More than the dancers, it was the cute and mischievous host that caught my attention. There was something very endearing about him. He was effortlessly relatable, yet there were flickers of a star inside. He would grab your attention and keep your eyes glued onto him even when he was just prancing around. Then one day, I saw him perform his signature slow-motion walk. It was so realistic that it seemed utterly surreal.

He soon dabbled in acting and after a few outings in movies and series like Kisi Ka Bhai Kisi Ki Jaan (2023), Abhay 2 (2020), Bahut Hua Samman (2020), Street Dancer 3D (2020), Any Body Can Dance 2 (2015), Sonali Cable (2014), he once again blew my mind in 2023 when he appeared in Nikhil Nagesh Bhat’s Kill—the cute host with an impish smile was now the unhinged and impulsive knife-wielding antagonist, Fani, prone to ultraviolence. Unlike most Bollywood villains, Fani was a character that was so ordinary that the sudden spurt of violence made him a terrifying antagonist.

Nothing had prepared me for this ‘killer’ act. And for Raghav, it was a huge risk. “I was seen as this lovable guy on television. I wanted to break that from the get-go. I don’t like getting stuck in a particular image. I had in fact refused a lot of offers of comedic roles before I got Kill. It was a crazy character, and it was exactly what I wanted to sink my teeth into at that point,” says Raghav as we settle down for a freewheeling chat at a studio in Mumbai's Aram Nagar on a rain-lashed, dark evening. Talking about how he found the right pitch to play Fani, he points out: “For Fani killing was like playing ludo. It is his normal. Robbing is his family business—it is just another job. I wanted to tap that zone. I played him like a normal guy…that was the contrast I wanted to create. When such a guy abruptly turns violent, his unpredictability hits the audience hard. I don’t believe that every dark character needs you to isolate yourself and get into some dark space—you need to know how much is required, varna woh technique dikhne lag jaati hai.”

Next year, he followed it up with another villainous act in Ravi Udyawar’s Yudhra. This time he was Shafiq—again an unhinged antagonist, but this time the pitch of acting was a tad over-the-top in keeping with the tone of the movie. “This character required tapping into a really dark space. I prepped a lot for that character. I had to create the character motivation in my head; it was not in the script. It was much more emotionally draining to play Shafiq…playing Fani was fun. But Yudhra is where more than craft, technique helped.”

Although Raghav’s penchant to play straight-faced evil characters was proven twice over, I strongly felt he was underutilised in both. While I would love Fani to have his own spin-off movie, Shafiq was a character that was weak on paper and worked for me only because of Raghav’s conviction. The year also saw him playing a cop in the Zee5 series, Gyaarah Gyaarah, proving his versatility. However, he became the talk of the town with his turn as Parvaiz, the ‘funny and loyal best friend’ of the protagonist, in Aryan Khan’s Netflix series The Ba***ds of Bollywood.

Bollywood Baddie To Bad of Bollywood

Although once again he was not playing the lead, Raghav once again proved his mettle by becoming the fan favourite. His quirky portrayal elevated the character from being a mere sidekick to the scene-stealer. Him fanboying Emraan Hashmi and singing Kaho Na Kaho became the most iconic and viral scene from the series.

“The Ba***ds of Bollywood has worked wonders for everyone, even for the actors doing the cameos,” he says. But, initially he was not keen on taking up the role of Parvaiz. “I didn’t want to take up the role as there wasn’t much in the script for me to do. But Aryan convinced me. In fact, it was the only character that actually took shape on the sets. It was the result of Aryan and I jamming together—a lot of it was improvised. Aryan actually has a friend like that, and I took a lot of his characteristics while working on Parvaiz,” says Raghav. Even the singing bit that became viral was developed on the sets. “It was Aryan’s idea. He made me do a lot of crazy stuff, including that viral moment on stage with Shah Rukh sir during the promotions. Shah Rukh sir is the only person who still gets me starstruck, and Aryan told me to completely ignore him on stage…” But with his childhood hero standing next to him, he couldn’t help but break the character. “I couldn’t do that… ignore karte karte pair chhu liya aur woh moment ban gaya,” he quips adding that such viral moments can’t be planned or created. “These natural moments trend organically,” he points out.

He has this casual ease both on stage and in front of the camera that makes even a scripted scene look like a spontaneous reaction…a natural moment. This might have something to do with his years working in television and on stage. “The more time you spend in front of the camera or on stage, the more relaxed you will be while acting. And a relaxed actor’s performance will always look more attractive to the audience,” says Raghav. But it is not that he was this relaxed from day one. “Earlier, before my dance performances, I would always get nervous and excited, but strangely enough while acting I am usually always very relaxed. Maybe it is because I am continuously shooting and I have been doing so for about 15 years now,” he says, adding that what might have also helped calm his nerves is the fact that unlike in a live performance on stage, where there is no margin for error, shoots give one the option of retakes. “That also enables you to try out different things—you can be in the moment, go into the unknown, and experiment. Even if it doesn’t work out, you can have another take. Therein lies the beauty of creating something in front of the camera.

But I can't deny the fact that it is my years of performing on stage that has helped me be spontaneous and be in the moment,” adds Raghav, who was initially rejected during his early appearances as a reality dance show contestant, but his unique style—which he named ‘Crockroaxz’ (a portmanteau of ‘crocodile’, representing powerful and bold movements, and ‘cockroach’, representing the creepy, jerky, and erratic moves)—soon went viral and earned him a wild card entry. Along with his unique dance style, it was his unscripted wit and antics that quickly made him a fan favourite and he finished the season as the second runner-up. It was his endearing and relatable persona, impeccable comic timing, and spontaneity that later helped him bag his job as a dance reality show host.

However, he points out that being spontaneous and improvising on set are two very different things. “Sometimes the script is written so well that you don’t need to improvise. Don’t dive into a role thinking that you will improvise. Read the whole script from the writer’s perspective and not the perspective of your character, and then decide. Kill was such a script.” But according to him, it is crucial for actors to be spontaneous. “You might have great command over the techniques of acting, you might have a great body, you might have everything going for you, but if you can’t be spontaneous in front of the camera, then you can’t become a good actor. An actor needs to be in the moment, s/he needs to be spontaneous for the acting to look fresh. As an actor it is your job to ensure that even when there is not an ounce of improvisation involved and you are just spouting the exact lines as per the script, it looks like you have just come up with those. You need to make the lines your own. If it looks like you are reading it from the teleprompter then you are not doing your job well,” he opines.

Apart from spontaneity, being a dancer also helps him create the physicality of the characters. “It helps me subconsciously catch the rhythm of a character. It is the rhythm that makes one character different from the other, otherwise the physicality of Fani and Parvaiz would look the same—your dialogue delivery might be different for each character but it is the physicality that establishes a character even before he starts to talk,” says the 34-year-old who has big movies up for release in 2026, including his Telugu debut The Paradise–a movie that will see him play an antagonist once again and face-off with Telugu star, Nani. And then he has King with King Khan! The boy from a regular middle-class family in Dehradun who was obsessed with Shah Rukh Khan and had dragged his mother and aunt to local single-screen theatres to watch each of his movies an obscene number of times, is now shooting with him. If this is not a quintessential Bollywood underdog story, then what is?

From Zero Period To Hero Period

As Om Prakash Makhija aka Shah Rukh Khan says in Om Shanti Om: “Agar kisi cheez ko dil se chaho toh puri kainaat usse tumse milane ki koshish mein lag jaati hai”... But for Raghav, this was not even in the realm of his dreams while growing up.

Raghav was born and brought up in the Enid Blyton-ish town of Dehradun. “Dehradun was a cool place to grow up in, and it has a culture of boarding schools. Although I was a day scholar,” he says wistfully. “I was at St. Thomas College and there they had a 'Zero Period' where students could pursue and practise any art form that they are good at. And every month we would have a fete where you could dance, jam and even dedicate songs to someone— St. Thomas ke samne even the Kuch Kuch Hota Hai college would look uninteresting. It was a crazy place,” he reminisces. But even in school, he was lucky to have a rather encouraging principal, “Maan sir loved me! I was good at dancing and all other kinds of extracurricular activities but not in my studies. He loved me and would often say: ‘tu try toh kar’!’”

But not everyone was this tolerant. His parents werent. They were mighty displeased with his low grades, and it didn’t help that he would often make his report card disappear or create a fake father out of nowhere to attend PTAs. “I was a naughty kid,” he confesses. “I loved Tom Sawyer, that was the kind of kid I was. That world was almost like the Dehradun I was growing up in.”

That world didn’t breed the dream of becoming an actor. “Bachpan mein toh sabka dream hota hai astronaut banna,’ he laughs. “However, I wanted to join the Army. I grew up near the cantonment area, and those were real-life heroes firing real tanks. I used to sneak into Garhi Cantt and watch them train or play football in the mud—things my mom would tell me not to do, but they were allowed to. Also, people in Uttarakhand have a strong sense of patriotism—desh ke liye kuchh karna thha.” And he wanted the whole country to know of him. But then inherently, he was a dancer and an artiste, and first brush with fame came with his very first television appearance. He took part in the Chak Dhoom Dhoom team challenge with his hip-hop dance crew, D-Maniax. While his teammates were elated with the fame the show brought them, Raghav had tasted blood. He wanted more. He wanted to participate in Dance India Dance (DID)—it was the biggest show then.

“After that team challenge, when I was in class XI that shift came—I got convinced that this was the career I wanted. I wanted the world to see me dance.” But it was 2012 and the year of his Boards exams. “All hell broke lose in my house the night before the audition and I told my parents that I will not go for it,” recalls Raghav. “But in the morning, I got this strong feeling that I needed to go for it…it was like my train is about to leave the station and I needed to jump on it. And I jumped on it—in fact I actually missed the train from Dehradun and boarded it from Haridwar!”

He auditioned and the rest is reality TV history, but becoming an actor was still not the dream. “Being a dancer wasn’t a stepping stone for me to become an actor. In fact, becoming an actor was not at all in my mind in those initial years; I wanted to become famous—at that point I wanted to become a famous dancer.”

It was, however, only after proving himself, first as a dancer and then as a host that Raghav looked towards acting. “I was reaching a plateau. It was becoming like an office job—I was hosting the show everyday as Raghav. I started wondering what I can do next; I wanted to grow. I would often go to Prithvi theatre and see the actors in their kurtas basking in their intellectual glory—I wanted to become one of them. Also, while working as the host, I saw the amount of respect and adulation an actor—be it a good one or a bad one—gets from everyone, and I wanted that for myself. I wanted to know ki ke kya hai isme?"

So, he went to Saurabh Sachdeva [actor, coach, and founder of The Actor’s Truth] to find out. “Once I started training, I found a whole new world opening up in front of me and within me. I could see my pretense, my defenses, I could lay bare the layers that I didn’t know existed within me—it is once you know all your layers can you get out of those and totally become a character. You have to know what blankets you are already wearing, remove those, and then wear the blanket of the character—otherwise you will be weighing down the character with your own blankets.”

The Doon Boy

However, his love for Bollywood had started while he was growing up as a kid in Dehradun. “Film ka toh bohot craze thha humare ghar mein. My mother and my aunt were movie buffs. In fact, my mother took me to watch Mira Nair’s Fire. So, I was not just watching popular Bollywood movies,” he says. But he is quick to admit that he was a die-hard fan of Shah Rukh Khan and used to watch his every movie multiple times. “I had watched Main Hoon Na seven to eight times. Sometimes I would get my dadaji to take me to the movies. We had single-screen theatres like Chhayadeep, Prabhat, and Krishna Palace in Dehradun. Each time I would come back from watching a film I would act out the scenes. Main woh movies ko jeeta thha—that is the magic of movies,” he recalls, adding “now when I am shooting with the same Shah Rukh Khan, each time before the camera starts rolling, I am transported to Prabhat cinema where a young Raghav is watching his hero spread his arms and his magic.” 

But he sorely misses that Dehradun of his childhood. “Jabse Dehradun par Delhi NCR-walon ka akraman hua hai aur Thar var aane lag gayi hai, tabse the town has started losing its charm, people have started losing their innocence. Instead of people sitting and reading at the libraries, now you have the quietness of the land shattered by the sounds of celebratory fires," he rues. Apart from the noise pollution, what gets his goat is the littering. "Earlier I used to stop and reprimand tourists if I saw them throwing out junk from their cars, but since the release of Kill, I have stopped doing that,” he chortles.

“Dehradun has changed so drastically and so fast,” he rues, wondering why the officials in power are so indifferent. “Uttarakhand should not be famous for malls. People will not come to Dehradun to shop for brands. They come for its natural beauty, and that should be protected; money should be spent on that instead of building malls and statues. The budget allocated for Dehradun should be spent on things that are at least aesthetically pleasing—wahaan Ambedkarji ki statue laga diye; woh lag hi nahi rahe hai Ambedkarji! What is the point of squandering money on such things?” says Raghav, whose love for his hometown and his longing for the olden days is evident in his social media posts.

According to him, the highway connecting Dehradun to Delhi has turned out to be a bane. “It has become a haven for people with zero civic sense. Dehradun is the town of Ruskin Bond, it is where IMA (Indian Military Academy) and FRA (Forest Research Institute) are, the place needs to be shown some love and respect. I understand that tourism is an important source of income for the locals, but tourism is there in Sikkim and Arunachal as well—but where are we going wrong? It is the aloofness of the people; we can’t blame the government for everything. We need to level up as locals,” says the Garhwali batting for introduction of ‘curated’ tourism in Uttarakhand. An avid trekker, he often documents his trips to places like Urgam Valley, Chopta, Kedarnath, Badrinath, and Uttarkashi on social media. “I didn’t know I was an avid ‘trekker’,” he quips. “Trekking ka matlab toh abhi pata chala hai! We are born and brought up there amid hills. While growing up, we used to travel here and there —there are so many rivers, we would take a picnic basket and a durrie, climb some mountain and have a picnic on the bank of some river. Picnics are still very popular in those parts. But now we call those ‘trekking’!” guffaws this accidental ‘trekker’ who even now promptly joins the group of his childhood friends for such trips whenever he is in Dehradun. “I am still the same awara boy when I am there. All my childhood friends, except two [and he goes on to name all of them], are there, and we pack ourselves into our tempo traveller aur hum nikal jaate hai camping ka samaan le kar—just the way we used to before I shifted to Mumbai,” he says. When asked about his favourite trekking routes, he lists places like Kedar Tal, Har Ki Doon, Brahmatal, Kedaar Kanta, Kana Taal, and Valley of Flowers. 

His becoming famous has not impacted his equation with his friends. “Unhe farak nehi padta hai. Some of them live in such remote areas that my fame is yet to even reach the periphery of their existence. A friend who works as a priest in Hrishikesh just called a few days back and when I told him that I was busy with shoots hence couldn’t visit Dehradun in recent weeks, he asked me ‘kis cheez ki shooting? Dance ki?’ he has no clue that I have become an actor! And I prefer it that way. I love the fame I have, and I love those who are totally unaware of this fame.

“Moreover, in the hills, they have their own superstars—for them Mahadev and the Himalayas are the stars; they worship them. The mountains, the glaciers, the rivers… unke samne meri aukaat hi nahi hai. There, if you talk about your achievement of bagging a film or meeting some big producer, you will not only sound lame, but you yourself will feel stupid. However big we become, we will always be so so tiny in front of nature—this realisation always keeps me grounded,” says the actor who credits nature for keeping him rooted.

The Monk Who Wants His Porsche

Apart from nature, there is another thing that he sorely misses. “I miss fame!” he quips admitting to his unsatiable hunger for it. “As I become famous, I miss being more famous!”

While mother nature is the superstar he is in awe of and bows down to, he has no qualms admitting that in his head he was always a star. “Today, after Kill and Bads…, if I am on the path of becoming a star, in my head I was always one, my stardom was always tangible for me—this journey is just to make the people see it; to make it tangible to them. The urgency of making it tangible is what keeps me agile, otherwise I would have plateaued over the years.”

The fact that he is a workaholic is as obvious as his love for nature. And hence just like Dehradun, where he often escapes in search of peace, he is in love with Mumbai—the city that gives him work and has made him famous. “I love my job—I can’t live without working. I work like a fauji. I eat two meals a day—I fast for 16 to 18 hours—and I just work. I always wanted to be famous, and Mumbai has given me that fame, so I absolutely love the city.” As much as he loves nature, he doesn’t aspire to become an ascetic. “Materialistic things are a byproduct of what I do. But don’t get me wrong; material things are important to me no doubt—I want to buy a Porsche and take it to Uttarakhand and drive around in it in the hills. My love for a Porsche can never replace the love I have for Uttarakhand or the mountains,” says the Doon boy. Swapping a tempo traveler with a Porsche is not at all a bad idea; we want to be part of that picnic!

Credits:

Head of Brand Partnerships & Experiences: Esha Singh (@ediosinghcrasy)
Sr. Art Director: Hemali Limbachiya (@hema_limbachiya)
Stylist: Aastha Sharma (@aasthasharma)
Styling Assistant: Manisha Chhanang (@iammanisha)
Hairstylist: Arnold D’Souza (@lovepeacestyle.in)
Make-up: Suhas Kondvilkar (@kondvilkarsuhas)
Production: Manav Lundia (@manavlundia) (@all.things.onyx)
Artist Reputation Management: Tree-Shul Media Solutions (@treeshulmediasolutions), Mandvi Gayatri Sharma (@mandvisharma16), Danica Joseph D'souza (@danica_dsouzaa)
Talent Management: Blue Orchid Entertainment (@blueorchidentertainment), Yogesh Nardekar (@yog_nardekar), Eshita Nimkar (@eshita_nimkar)