Actor Abhishek Chauhan of Delhi is living life to the fullest. After the successful run of his show Cubicles—its fourth season began in 2024—the actor is back with his latest series, Khauf which premiered on Amazon Prime this month. Cubicles won the hearts of many nine-to-five young professionals. In Khauf, ‘the scene’ is completely different. A slow-paced horror film, in it, Chauhan plays Arun, a complex character who falls in love with Madhu (played by Monika Panwar), the protagonist of the film.
Chauhan’s career, is dotted with diverse characters, often contradictory to one another—for instance, in Cubicles, he is Piyush Prajapati, an aspirational newbie in the corporate world; in the web series Asur, he plays Shubh Joshi, a ruthless villain whose rationale for killing people is to save the earth from human sins. In Khauf, he plays a medical representative who helps his partner Madhu overcome the trouble she encounters, and as a result, faces some eerie consequences.
The actor’s journey started on the Delhi stage, specifically at his school, Sardar Patel Vidyalaya. “It’s one of the most wonderful schools of Delhi,” says Chauhan, who now stays in Mumbai.”I was interested in academics, and at the same time, I also enjoyed performing on stage. Unlike other institutions, my school never pressured me to prefer academics over acting. Instead, it encouraged me to do what I loved,” he says. He continued the passion as a student of Hindu College.
Showing his range
There is hardly a corporate worker who has not seen Piyush Prajapati’s journey at Synnotech Innovations (a fictionalised IT company in Cubicles). Through four installments, the show made Chahuhan a popular face on OTT platforms.
With success, at an early stage, it often happens that actors may pick up similar roles; there’s a certain safety in being typecast. Chauhan’s story is different. He went on to play the main villain in Asur 2 and Rishi (a documentary maker who unearths the reasons for a girl’s murder) in Undekhi, which are fundamentally different from Piyush Prajapati.
“This habit of taking up contrasting roles developed from my theatre experience. When you do theatre, you need to take up the challenge to perform characters coming from diverse socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. And that is why I never found it difficult to switch from one character to another. Theatre prepares you for this,” he says, adding that as he has never been a nine-to-five worker with a conventional life himself, he does not hesitate in taking up diverse challenges. “I do not do characters with similarity to my original personality anyway,” he says.
Horror debut
The experience of working in the latest Amazon Prime Web Series, Khauf, is special to Chauhan. “Khauf is a slow-paced horror thriller, and my character is a multi-layered one. It also allowed me to share the screen with [actor-director] Rajat Kapoor. I grew up watching his films. I would watch his films when I was in college. I even saw him act on stage when I came to Mumbai. I wanted to meet him, and when I finally did, I acted my heart out. He is a very warm and generous person with whom I had a lot of conversations.