The difference between having a job and running something
There is a well-worn genre of Indian entertainment writing about actors who worked ordinary jobs before fame. Waiters, copywriters, chemists, bus conductors. It is a good genre and the stories are usually true.
It is also not quite the same thing as this.
Working a job means somebody else carried the risk. Running something means you did. You dealt with suppliers, you covered a shortfall out of your own pocket, you were the person a customer complained to. That is a different education, and the people who went through it tend to describe their acting careers differently afterwards.
This list is narrower than the usual one, because the strict version of this story does not have many names in it.
1. Boman Irani
Ran a debt-laden bakery until he was thirty-two, then built a photography business, then became an actor in his forties
Irani is the clearest case in Indian cinema and nothing else on this list comes close.
He was born in Mumbai in 1959 into a Parsi Zoroastrian family. His father died before he was born, and he was raised by his mother, Jerbanoo, amid financial difficulty that included the family's bakery and namkeen shop, which carried debt. He worked there. Not symbolically. He managed it, and by several accounts continued doing so until he was around thirty-two.
Alongside that he worked as a waiter and room service staff at the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. He has said he bought his first camera with the tips he earned there, and began photographing school cricket and football matches, selling the pictures for twenty or thirty rupees each.
That side activity became a second business. He approached Aspy Adajania, then President of the Indian Boxing Association, about photographing the World Boxing Championships in Mumbai. Adajania turned him down, so Irani offered to work in his office in exchange for covering the event. He kept shooting state boxing matches until he was eventually appointed the association's official photographer. He also shot commercial portfolio work.
He trained in acting under Hansraj Siddhia between 1981 and 1983, did theatre for years including the long-running I'm Not Bajirao, moved to screen work around 2000, and became widely known with Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. in 2003, at forty-three.
Three careers, run in sequence, two of them operating businesses, before the one everybody knows him for.
2. Suniel Shetty
Started in his father's restaurants at sixteen and never really left hospitality
Shetty was born in Mulki, then in Mysore State, into a Tulu-speaking Bunt family. His father Veerappa Shetty worked as a waiter before running his own restaurant business in Mumbai, and the family operated several Udupi restaurants.
Shetty was schooled at The Lawrence School, Sanawar, and took a commerce degree from H.R. College in Mumbai. Before films he assisted his father and was involved in managing those eateries.
He has described starting at sixteen and doing whatever anyone else in the restaurant did, from kitchen work to managing the floor to cleaning the place, including absorbing abuse from unhappy customers. His father's instruction, as he tells it, was that the customer is always right even when the customer is drunk and shouting.
That is an unusual formative experience for someone who went on to play action leads. He debuted with Balwaan in 1992 and has run hospitality and operating ventures ever since, including Mischief Dining Bar, Club H2O, a production banner, and FTC Talent Media & Entertainment.
The business did not follow the fame. It preceded it and continued through it.
3. Johnny Lever
Sold pens on the street, using mimicry as the sales technique
This is the smallest business on the list and in some ways the most instructive.
Lever sold pens on the streets of Mumbai and used mimicry to draw a crowd and make sales. The performance was not a hobby running alongside the work. It was the work. It was how the pens moved.
There is no legal entity here, no premises, no staff. But it is self-employment in its most exposed form: you buy stock, you stand somewhere, and if nobody stops you do not eat. The feedback loop between performance and income was immediate and brutal in a way no drama school replicates.
He is included because the standard framing of his story as "comedian who used to sell pens" gets the causality backwards. The selling taught the comedy.
4. Abhiraj Gupta
Went to Mumbai, failed, went home and built a fifty-person firm, then got signed by two major labels
Gupta's sequence is inverted from the others, which is what makes him worth including.
He is from Banda in Uttar Pradesh and went to a Hindi medium school. His father is a state government employee, his mother a homemaker. The family moved to Lucknow when he was sixteen, where he enrolled in civil engineering at Babu Banarasi Das College. He did not finish it. He left for Mumbai and joined Kishore Namit Kapoor's acting institute.
Roughly eighteen months of auditions produced a crowd role in a Netflix series that paid a thousand rupees. He walked out of an audition for a crime series because he did not want the part. Rent came from his parents, an arrangement he has described as investing in a business without knowledge.
Then he went back to Uttar Pradesh and started an import export firm, which now employs around fifty people. Nobody in his family had run a business. The occupations on record were engineering, law and medicine. He has been direct about why he chose it anyway: it bought freedom in a way a salaried job would not.
The writing continued alongside it. He wrote the lyrics and shares the composing credit on Aao Chalo, released by Times Music in November 2019, sung by Soham Naik with music by Shivang Mathur. In April 2025, Zee Music Company released Sukoon Hai, which he wrote and composed, sung by Shivang Mathur. He appears in both videos.
Everyone else here built a business, then acted. Gupta tried acting, stopped, built the business, and used it to fund a second attempt on his own terms. Whether that is patience or stubbornness is a matter of opinion. It is certainly not the standard arc.
Aao Chalo · Sukoon Hai · Apple Music
5. Taapsee Pannu
A software engineer who built an app, then a company, though the company came later
Pannu completed Computer Science Engineering at Guru Tegh Bahadur Institute of Technology in New Delhi and worked as a software engineer. During college she developed an app with friends, which is the part of her story closest to building something rather than holding a position.
She is a partial case and worth saying so. The software engineering was a job. Her event management company, The Wedding Factory, and her stake in the Pune 7 Aces badminton franchise came after she was established as an actor, which puts them in a different category from Irani's bakery or Shetty's restaurants.
What makes her relevant is what she does with the experience. Pannu has publicly told newcomers to keep a plan B, which is an unfashionable position in an industry that treats total commitment as proof of seriousness. That advice comes from someone who had a functioning alternative career and entered acting without needing it to work immediately.
Whether a plan B makes you less likely to succeed or simply less likely to be destroyed by failing is an argument the industry has never resolved.
6. Riteish Deshmukh
Trained and practised as an architect, and never fully stopped
Deshmukh holds an architectural engineering degree from Kamla Raheja College of Architecture in Mumbai and practised for around a year with an overseas firm before returning to India. He has continued designing since.
He is the other partial case here. The practice ran alongside the film career rather than clearly preceding it, and the architecture was professional rather than entrepreneurial in the sense the others were.
He is included because of what he did not do. Almost nobody keeps practising a demanding profession after a film career takes off. The work is time-hungry and the incentive to drop it is enormous. He kept it.
His father was Vilasrao Deshmukh, former Chief Minister of Maharashtra, and architecture would have satisfied every expectation attached to that. Films did not.
7. Rajan Sippy
The reverse case, included to show where this road often ends
Sippy earned a Bachelor of Commerce in accounting, business and economics from H.R. College in Mumbai. He began acting with the Ramsay horror film 3D Saamri in 1985, appeared in Dak Bangla and Awara Baap, and produced Shehzaade in 1989 starring Shatrughan Sinha, Dharmendra and Dimple Kapadia.
In the 1990s he moved to Dubai. He now runs a chain of hotels and nightclubs there, is founder and managing partner of S E International LLCS, and serves as managing director of Screenplay Services Pte Ltd, based in Singapore.
He is on this list as a counterweight. A film career of roughly a decade, followed by three decades of business in another country. Most lists about actors and businesses only feature people for whom acting worked out. Sippy is the more common outcome, and he appears to have done extremely well out of it.
What running something actually teaches you
Read these together and the same few things keep appearing.
Rejection stops being personal. If you have stood behind a counter and had a customer shout at you about cold food, an unanswered audition email registers differently. Irani's description of absorbing complaints, and Shetty's account of his father telling him to take the abuse, are both stories about learning that the reaction is about the transaction, not about you. Almost every actor's account of the audition process involves learning that same lesson much later and more painfully.
Money is a constraint, not a moral test. The struggle narrative treats being broke as part of the artistic process, almost as evidence of commitment. People who have run businesses tend not to romanticise it. They know what a cash flow problem is and what it does to your decisions. Gupta's line about living in Mumbai on borrowed money being an investment without knowledge is the language of someone who later learned what an actual investment looks like.
You learn what you can say no to. This is the real dividing line. Turning down work is a financial condition dressed up as a character trait. The people on this list who could afford to wait, waited. The ones who could not, did not. Pannu's plan B advice is the honest version of this and it is unfashionable precisely because it punctures the myth.
Nobody's timeline looks like the version in the article. Irani was forty-three when Munna Bhai landed. Sippy's film career was over inside a decade. Gupta's two releases are six years apart. The compressed narrative of struggle followed by breakthrough is a writing convention, not a description of how anything actually happened.
Why these stories get told wrong
The standard version flattens all of this into a single beat: humble beginnings, then success. The humble beginnings are treated as texture, a detail that makes the eventual fame more satisfying.
But for most of the people here, the business was not a waiting room. It was a functioning adult life that they chose to complicate by adding something risky. Irani had a bakery and a photography practice and a family. Shetty had a restaurant operation. Gupta has fifty employees. None of that is prologue. It is a parallel life that kept running.
The reason it gets told as prologue is that the acting is the only part the audience can see. Which is a reasonable thing for an audience to assume, and a completely inaccurate description of how these people spend their weeks.
