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The quiet thunder
Bollywood Insider recalls 2025’s most underrated performances
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Bollywood Insider - Sat, 14, Feb 2026
- 22:15 EST
- 11
Posters of Mrs, Chhaava, 120 Bahadur and Maa / Mrs, Chhaava, 120 Bahadur and Maa
In a year powered by noise-box-office fireworks, PR blitzes, and social-media hysteria-some of Bollywood's finest performances slipped by like whispers in a storm. They didn't trend. They didn't headline. They didn't measure their worth in decibels.
Instead, they lingered. In pauses. In glances. In the emotional shadows where real craft often hides.
This is our tribute to the actors who did not demand attention-but seized it anyway. The ones who worked with truth instead of theatrics. The quiet thunder you felt even if you didn't hear it.
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Sanya Malhotra: Mrs
Sanya Malhotra turns domestic stillness into rebellion. As Richa, she captures a woman rediscovering her worth, not through theatrics but through the delicate choreography of her silences. Every glance is a paragraph; every hesitation is history.
Performances like this don't scream for applause. They simmer-and that unnerves people more than rage ever could.
Kajol: Maa
Kajol deconstructs the sanctified "Bollywood maa" with a portrayal scraped raw by guilt, identity, and unspoken emotional labour. Her character bleeds, doubts, lashes out-and loves with bone-deep intensity.
It wasn't glossy. It wasn't pretty. It was real. And it deserved far more celebration than the industry afforded.
Vicky Kaushal: Chhava
As Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj, Vicky Kaushal brings vulnerability to a role often trapped in legend. His king is burdened by politics, expectation, and the crushing machinery of history.
While discourse spiralled into historical nitpicking, Kaushal's nuanced performance-quiet, wounded, magnificent-slipped through the cracks.
Aditya Roy Kapur: Metro In Dino
Aditya Roy Kapur thrives when playing men who feel too much and speak too little-and in Metro... In Dino, the writing finally trusts him with that emotional architecture.
He plays vulnerability like muscle memory: a smile that falters, a pause that aches, a softness that startles. In a film crowded with louder arcs, his performance was the most delicately crafted-and unjustly overlooked.
Gajraj Rao: Thai Massage
Gajraj Rao chooses vulnerability over slapstick, crafting a performance that touches before it tickles. It's comedy rooted in humanity and in a landscape addicted to loud humour, that subtlety barely stood a chance.
Pratik Gandhi: Phule
Pratik Gandhi plays Jyotiba Phule with the dignity of a man who changed history quietly, painfully, purposefully. No theatrics. No myth-making.
Just the moral weight of a reformer rendered human-wounded, resolute, and profoundly moving. It's one of the year's most important performances, and one of the most undervalued.
Farhan Akhtar: 120 Bahadur
Farhan Akhtar builds his performance like a soldier builds endurance-quietly, internally, with immense restraint. Playing a man carrying invisible wounds, he sheds machismo for truth. His heroism isn't loud; it's lived.
In a genre obsessed with spectacle, Farhan offered stillness and the industry didn't look closely enough. Because Not All Performances Need Spotlights Some need only sincerity.
Some need only truth.
And some-like these-need only a patient audience willing to listen for the echoes hiding beneath the noise. Here's to the quiet thunder.
The performances whispered, not shouted-and therefore unforgettable.
Discover more at New India Abroad.
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