Abhay Deol comes from a family of superstars. His uncle is veteran actor Dharmendra and his cousins are Sunny Deol and Bobby Deol. While one might assume that due to their superstardom, growing up a ‘Deol’ must’ve been easy for Abhay, the actor recently revealed that this was not the case.
In a recent chat with Dirty Magazine, Abhay said that he doesn’t live in Mumbai for too long. He said, “I built a house in Goa, so I try and spend as much time there as I can. Over the last nine years, I’ve also been spending a lot of time in LA, which is good because I am anonymous there… The desire to disappear is very much there for me. It’s always been there. And I know why.”
Abhay said that this urge to disappear comes from his childhood years, growing up as a member of the Deol family. He said, “The fame was at a different level. I mean, I was a kid in the ’80s. Before the advent of technology and travel and knowledge and access to a whole world of entertainment. And so the kind of celebrity worship at the time, I saw that with my uncle [Dharmendra]. And then when bhaiyya [Sunny Deol] was launched in the early ’80s, I saw the crazy fame around him.”
“I never liked going to school and being asked personal questions about the family, people were always talking. Some teachers would be extremely nice to me just because of my last name, others would be particularly bad with me because of it. Just depended on the individual and what they thought of celebrity,” he said.
Abhay added that contrary to his cool persona now, he used to be an underconfident kid. He said, “You know a lot of people now talk about working on their traumas in therapy, understanding what brought them to this point, but so much of our trauma is also passed down to us by our parents… I think a lot of it was generational trauma so I had to reflect upon my parents’ lives to sort of see why I was traumatised. It’s not like I had some significantly abused life, no, but we all have our baggage.”
Why did he then want to become an actor? Abhay said, “I always liked acting, but didn’t want to do it because I was in a family of actors. And because I didn’t like the attention that fame brought. So I think when I entered the industry, there was always that fear of attention because I just wanted to act and do my work quietly. I also came from that old-school notion of mystery being attractive about a celebrity as opposed to being available and accessible all the time.”
Meanwhile, Abhay Deol has teamed up with emerging international EDM artist PIA in the visually striking music video Follow the Toad, directed by filmmaker Joe Sill. The video, shot in a single day using cutting-edge virtual production techniques, transports viewers to a fantastical world inspired by iconic adventures like Indiana Jones and The Lord of the Rings. Additionally, Abhay Deol completed nineteen years of his acting career in 2024.
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