Akshay Kumar: Five Deep Dives Into the Khiladi’s Real Story

Akshay Kumar The Bangkok Years: How Martial Arts Built the Star

The story of how Akshay Kumar became a film star is, at its core, a story about a teenager who convinced his father to send him to Thailand. He had already earned a black belt in Taekwondo while studying at Don Bosco High School in Matunga, Mumbai, and training karate simultaneously alongside his academics — but he wanted more. He enrolled at Guru Nanak Khalsa College of Arts, Science and Commerce in Mumbai but dropped out completely disinterested, and it was around this time he told his father he wanted to learn martial arts at a serious, professional level. His father, a military man with modest means, saved money over a period of time specifically to fund this plan.
Akshay went to Bangkok and stayed for five years — not on a study-abroad programme, not with financial support from home, but largely self-funded by working as a waiter and chef in Thai hotels and restaurants while training every day. The discipline required to maintain that dual life — physically gruelling martial arts training in the day, service industry work to cover rent and food — is something he has referenced repeatedly in interviews as the foundational experience of his entire adult life. He trained specifically in Muay Thai (Thai Boxing), the stand-up striking system that trains practitioners to use fists, elbows, knees, and shins as weapons, which gave him a fluid, economical physical fighting style significantly different from the rigid, theatrical action choreography that dominated Hindi films at the time.​​
After Bangkok, his path back to Mumbai was circuitous in a way that most biographical summaries skip over. He worked in Kolkata in a travel agency. He moved to Dhaka and worked as a chef in a hotel. He returned to Delhi and spent time selling Kundan jewellery door to door. Each stop added a layer of real-world exposure — customer service, financial negotiation, physical labour — that sits visibly in his screen personality as a certain groundedness that actors trained exclusively in film institutes often lack. He finally returned to Mumbai and opened as a martial arts instructor. It was one of his students’ fathers — himself a modelling coordinator — who first suggested Akshay consider modelling. His first assignment paid him more in two days than his entire month’s martial arts teaching income. He never went back to the studio.​​

Upcoming Movies 2026: Bhoot Bangla to Dhoom 4

Akshay Kumar’s 2026 slate is his most strategically calibrated in years — each project assigned a genre slot, each designed to address a specific commercial weakness from the 2022–24 slump.​
Bhooth Bangla is now confirmed for May 15, 2026 — the date shifted from the original April 2 slot after a clash with Dhurandhar 2 forced a rescheduling. The film is directed by Priyadarshan — the first collaboration between the two since Bhool Bhulaiyaa (2007), which remains one of the highest-grossing horror comedies in Bollywood history. The cast includes Paresh Rawal and Rajpal Yadav — the same core trio from the original — alongside Tabu and Wamiqa Gabbi. The film is produced under Balaji Motion Pictures and revolves around a haunted mansion, with Akshay playing a ghost hunter who discovers the mansion’s supernatural occupants may not be what they initially appear. The commercial logic is straightforward: the Priyadarshan-Akshay-Paresh horror comedy format has a proven, loyal audience, and revisiting it 19 years later carries built-in nostalgia that no amount of marketing spend can replicate.
Dhoom 4 is confirmed for October 31, 2026 (Diwali), directed by Maneesh Sharma under Yash Raj Films. The Dhoom franchise — which starred John Abraham, Hrithik Roshan, and Aamir Khan as successive antagonists across three films — has a tradition of casting each edition’s actual star as its villain rather than its hero, and Akshay is expected to follow that pattern. The franchise’s fourth film has been in development limbo since Dhoom 3 (2013), and its October 2026 slot makes it one of the most anticipated Diwali releases in years.​
Welcome to the Jungle — the third instalment in the Welcome franchise — is a multi-star comedy ensemble featuring Akshay alongside Sanjay Dutt, Arshad Warsi, Jacqueline Fernandez, Raveena Tandon, and Lara Dutta, with a release expected in the first half of 2026. Rowdy Rathore 2 is confirmed for 2026, with Akshay reprising his double-role as the fearless police officer Rowdy Rathore — the original was a ₹1.15 billion hit in 2012. Hera Pheri 4, featuring the iconic trio of Akshay Kumar, Paresh Rawal, and Suniel Shetty, is also scheduled for 2026 with a release date yet to be announced. Haiwaan, a high-octane action film co-starring Saif Ali Khan and Ajay Devgn, is in pipeline with a likely 2026–27 release.

Family Life and Marriage to Twinkle Khanna

Akshay Kumar and Twinkle Khanna’s relationship is among the most genuinely interesting in Bollywood — two people who met under the least romantic of circumstances (a film set in 1999), conducted a courtship that was initially very low-key, and built what has become one of the industry’s most durable, mutually independent partnerships.​
Twinkle Khanna — born Rinke Khanna, daughter of Rajesh Khanna and Dimple Kapadia — was at the tail end of her acting career when they met on the sets of International Khiladi (1999). She retired from films in 2001, the same year they married on January 17 — a private ceremony with family only, notable for its absence of the typical Bollywood grand-wedding performance. She subsequently reinvented herself entirely: first as an interior designer through her business Tweak India, then as an author whose essay collections — Mrs Funnybones (2015) and The Legend of Lakshmi Prasad (2016) — both became bestsellers and won the Crossword Book Award, an unlikely achievement for a Bollywood actress transitioning careers. She later produced the biopic Padman (2018) — the film that grew from research she shared with Akshay about Arunachalam Muruganantham’s low-cost sanitary pad manufacturing.​
Their two children are Aarav Kumar (born September 15, 2002) and Nitara Kumar (born September 25, 2012). Aarav has consistently refused any interest in entering the film industry and maintains a deliberately private life, which both parents have publicly supported. Nitara appears occasionally in family photographs and at public events. Akshay has spoken extensively about his marriage as a partnership of equals — an unusually honest framing for an era when most Bollywood stars described their wives in more decorative terms. He has credited Twinkle specifically with giving him stability and perspective during the years of commercial success when the film industry can become a distorting environment for one’s sense of reality.​
Twinkle’s public persona — sharp, irreverent, politically independent — sometimes contrasts visibly with Akshay’s carefully managed patriotic positioning, which she has gently mocked in her writing. The contrast, rather than creating friction, appears to be what makes the partnership work.

Highest Grossing Films and Box Office Records

Akshay Kumar holds distinctive commercial records in Hindi cinema, characterized by a sustained multi-genre peak (2016–2021) rather than isolated blockbusters. This run included patriotic dramas, comedies, and ensemble hits, culminating in four consecutive ₹200 crore+ net India films in 2019—an unparalleled achievement. The table lists his top performers by worldwide gross (approximate ₹ crore figures from industry sources as of early 2026).

Figures are approximate and vary slightly by source due to reporting differences (e.g., India net vs. gross, Hindi share for multilingual films like 2.0). Akshay Kumar’s 2019 run (Kesari, Mission Mangal, Housefull 4, Good Newwz) delivered over ₹750 crore net in India across four films, a benchmark for volume and consistency. Recent 2025 releases show resurgence but remain below peak levels. Data compiled from Bollywood Hungama, Sacnilk, Box Office India, and related reports.

His 2019 single-year record — four films each grossing over ₹200 crore domestically in a single calendar year — has not been replicated by any other actor in Hindi cinema. He is the only Hindi film actor to have delivered blockbusters in five consecutive calendar decades: 1990s (Khiladi, Mohra), 2000s (Hera Pheri, Namastey London), 2010s (Airlift, Rustom), 2020s (Sooryavanshi, OMG 2), and 2026 onwards. In 2020, Forbes ranked him as the world’s highest-paid actor at $48.5 million — the only Indian entertainer to ever top that global list.

Fitness Routine and Social Causes

Akshay Kumar’s fitness is not a brand strategy — it is the operating system of his entire life. He wakes at 4:00 AM every day without exception, regardless of shoot schedules, international time zones, or award season demands. His morning begins with a jog outdoors, followed by a two-hour gym session combining cardio, strength training, core work, and martial arts drills. He specifically avoids machine-dependent workouts — his training is almost entirely functional and bodyweight-focused, consistent with the Muay Thai tradition he was trained in during his Bangkok years. He incorporates swimming with weighted laps for core stability, parkour for agility and spatial awareness, basketball, and trekking trips — disciplines that address different physical systems rather than optimising for aesthetics alone. In the evenings, he adds a 30-minute boxing or agility session, making his total daily training time 2.5–3 hours. He goes to sleep at 9:00 PM — a bedtime he has kept so consistently that he has declined multiple awards ceremonies because they ran past it.
His diet is correspondingly disciplined — he eats every two hours from a menu designed around protein, complex carbohydrates, and seasonal vegetables, with full abstinence from alcohol. He has spoken about occasionally following intermittent fasting and consuming raw foods in the morning before workouts. The physical result — visible at 58 — is routinely cited by fitness professionals as one of the most credible examples of long-term sustainable physical conditioning in Indian public life.​
On social causes, the film that most completely embodied the intersection of his commercial instincts and genuine conviction was Padman (2018). The project began when Twinkle Khanna researched Arunachalam Muruganantham — the Tamil Nadu social entrepreneur who invented a low-cost sanitary pad manufacturing machine — and brought the story to Akshay. He produced and starred in the film personally, using it to directly address the taboo around menstrual hygiene in India. He held real conversations with women in rural areas during research and used his Rs 100 crore+ opening weekend audience reach to deliver a public health message that government campaigns had failed to normalise for decades. Toilet: Ek Prem Katha (2017) used a comedy-drama template to advocate for open defecation-free villages under the Swachh Bharat campaign — a film that generated genuine behavioural impact in rural areas where sanitation messaging had not previously penetrated through entertainment.
His Bharat Ke Veer digital platform, launched in partnership with the Ministry of Home Affairs, allows Indian citizens to donate directly to accounts of martyred security force personnel’s families — a cause he has supported through both financial contribution and continuous platform promotion. He pledged 20% of proceeds from mobile game FAU-G to the trust, and has made personal financial donations to defence families that he has largely kept out of public visibility. He received the National Award for Best Actor for Rustom (2016) and the Padma Shri from the Government of India in 2009 — recognitions that, taken together, position him as one of the few entertainers in Indian public life whose contribution extends meaningfully beyond the box office.