Tiger Shroff escapes real-life shooting in Mumbai: Revisiting his 2019 interview with Gulf News about fame, famous dad, and privilege

Dubai: Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff is accustomed to dodging bullets, taking on villains and performing gravity-defying stunts on the big screen. But on October 18, the action star found himself caught in a frightening real-life shooting incident in Mumbai's Juhu neighbourhood.

Unidentified gunmen opened fire on a car carrying Shroff as he was leaving a football ground. The actor escaped without gunshot injuries, but his driver and another person were injured. Police launched an investigation into the attack, while claims linking it to the Lawrence Bishnoi gang remained unverified.

It was a disturbing episode for an actor whose career has largely been built around playing seemingly indestructible action heroes.

And it prompted us to revisit a decidedly lighter chapter in his Bollywood journey.

In May 2019, Gulf News interviewed a then 29-year-old Shroff ahead of the UAE release of Student Of The Year 2, a Karan Johar-backed campus drama in which the biggest threats came from jealous classmates, bruised egos and ridiculously competitive college contests.

Back then, Shroff wasn't navigating troubling headlines. He was navigating the gilded corridors of a fictional college where students looked as though they had stepped straight out of a designer fashion campaign.

And the actor, who had never attended college himself, was rather delighted to finally experience campus life — even if it was entirely make-believe.

This interview was originally conducted and published by Gulf News on May 9, 2019, and is being revisited in light of the October 2026 shooting incident. All quotes below are from that original conversation.

He's never attended college or been part of a convocation ceremony, but Bollywood actor Tiger Shroff seemed to have made up for that lost opportunity in spectacular fashion.

The ripped son of veteran actor Jackie Shroff had become an alumnus of one of the fanciest, albeit fictional, colleges ever shown in Hindi films.

In director Punit Malhotra's Student Of The Year 2, Shroff played Rohan, an athletic underdog who finds himself thrust into a world of privileged teenagers, extravagant wardrobes and elaborate romantic entanglements.

"This was my way of making up for not going to college," Shroff told Gulf News with a laugh during our 2019 interview.

The actor explained that he had landed his first leading role in Heropanti soon after finishing high school, effectively skipping the conventional college experience.

But being admitted into the coveted Student Of The Year universe was hardly an ordinary substitute.

After all, this was a Karan Johar production, where the students were impossibly attractive, their problems were spectacularly privileged and their biggest academic concern appeared to be winning an inconsequential college trophy.

Your merit in the SOTY universe was naturally enhanced if your brawn and beauty outweighed your brain.

For the uninitiated, the original Student Of The Year, released in 2012, introduced Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan and Sidharth Malhotra to Bollywood.

It also established a curious cinematic universe populated by crazy-rich, pampered Indian students who fought rabidly to win an intra-college contest.

In Johar's outlandish world, students looked as though they belonged in a hedonistic music video rather than a drab classroom.

And Shroff's sequel wasn't about to dismantle that fantasy.

Point out that the average awkward college-goer rarely resembles the immaculately groomed, athletic specimens in the SOTY 2 trailer, and Shroff (who came across as a modern-day Tarzan leaping off benches) had a serviceable response.

"What you see here is a fun school. It's a school that you want everyone to be a part of. We wanted everyone to fall in love with it," he said.

The students of SOTY 2 were highly desirable creatures who wore their hearts on ridiculously expensive sleeves.

Agreed, Bollywood musicals have never been particularly devoted to realism. Fantasy, frills and extravagant song sequences are practically part of their DNA.

But weren't the makers of SOTY 2 pulling at that thread a little too enthusiastically?

Think designer wardrobes owned by overindulged teenagers, bratty diva-in-training behaviour, silly dance contests and enough heartbreak to keep an entire college counselling department employed.

Shroff, however, insisted there was more to the film than its glamorous packaging.

"But there's a strong emotional content in our film and a strong message too. You will see many beats in this film," he said.

In Student Of The Year 2, the drama intensified when students of St Teresa's competed for an inter-collegiate trophy called the Dignity Cup.

Yes, the Dignity Cup.

Sounds trite? Shroff wasn't buying that criticism.

His character Rohan was the classic underdog, a boy from a modest background trying to find his feet in an unfamiliar world of money, privilege and power.

"It's not some complex, out-of-the box role. I play a normal happy-go-lucky guy who gets into a posh school from a poor sports-driven school on a scholarship. How does he adjust to a larger-than-life school is explored? How does go about the new, unfamiliar glossy world is what the movie is all about," Shroff explained.

The actor was clearly comfortable playing the athletic outsider, a role that allowed him to put his enviable physical abilities to good use.

But his character's problems weren't limited to surviving the social hierarchy of a swanky campus.

He also found himself being pursued by two beautiful women, played by newcomers Ananya Panday and Tara Sutaria.

And that particular plot development didn't seem to bother him one bit.

"Now, that [being wooed by two women] was a dream come true… But it's limited to the film alone sadly," Shroff said.

The action star may have been the film's biggest draw, but he was generous in his praise of his female co-stars.

"I wasn't some senior actor… The girls were so well-prepared," he said.

The film also marked the Bollywood debuts of Ananya Panday, daughter of actor Chunky Panday, and Tara Sutaria, a former Disney star.

Both were launched under the watchful eye of Johar, who had famously been labelled the "flag-bearer of nepotism" by actress Kangana Ranaut.

Panday played Shreya, the quintessential mean girl whose privileged upbringing and narcissistic streak made her a formidable campus diva.

Sutaria played Mia, the ambitious, good-hearted young woman who caught Rohan's eye.

A scene in which the affluent Shreya painted Rohan's bike pink "like a princess" was problematic on several levels.

But then again, expecting nuanced gender politics from a franchise where students seemed to spend more time perfecting their dance routines than attending lectures was perhaps asking for too much.

Sutaria, meanwhile, was hardly a stranger to performing.

Before making her film debut, she had appeared in Disney shows including The Suite Life of Karan & Kabir and Best Of Luck Nikki.

"There wasn't any fear in any sense at all. I think I have really been fortunate to be doing what I have done before 'Student Of the Year 2'... For most of my life, I have been performing and I have been an ambassador for Disney. I have been a part of this line of work for a while," Sutaria said in a separate interview with IANS at the time.

Actor Aditya Seal rounded out the principal cast as Manav, another important player in the film's romantic and competitive rivalries.

If impossibly wealthy students and spectacular dance contests weren't enough, Student Of The Year 2 also came with a rather unexpected Hollywood connection.

Will Smith.

Yes, the Oscar-winning actor, long before his infamous Academy Awards controversy, had made a special appearance in the film's elaborate Bollywood dance universe.

Smith's brush with Hindi cinema was documented in a Facebook video series chronicling his adventures in India.

And the Hollywood star admitted that Bollywood choreography wasn't quite as effortless as it appeared.

"In the beginning, I came, I was such a mess! It was a whole lot harder than I thought it was going to be. But it was absolutely a bucket list moment! Man, I've been in this business for over 30 years, and this moment right here is reconnecting me back to why I do this," Smith said in the videos.

Johar, too, had spoken enthusiastically about their association during the film's trailer launch in Mumbai.

"Fortunately, I know Will Smith for a few years now, and when his team got in touch with us, we were shooting for 'Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani'. He came and rehearsed for 'Radhaa' [a song from 2012's 'Student of the Year'], and there is synergy between the two films. He came and shot that," Johar told reporters.

Clearly, the SOTY universe had enough pulling power to lure even Hollywood royalty onto its dance floor.

Cameos are practically a compulsory subject in the Karan Johar school of filmmaking.

And SOTY 2 didn't disappoint.

Alia Bhatt, who became an overnight sensation after her debut in the original film, returned to shake a leg with Shroff in The Hook-Up Song.

The number was catchy, glossy and terrifically trite — which, in the world of Student Of The Year, was hardly a criticism.

There was also the obligatory dose of nostalgia.

The sequel recreated Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani, a classic RD Burman composition, giving it a shiny new Bollywood makeover.

The original film had similarly revived Disco Deewane.

Some might consider the relentless recycling of retro hits a sign of creative bankruptcy, but Johar had made it clear that revisiting old songs was part of the franchise's musical identity.

Why invent a new tune when an old one can be repackaged with expensive costumes and elaborate choreography?

Seven years after that conversation, the circumstances bringing Tiger Shroff back into the headlines couldn't be more different.

In 2019, the actor was promoting a glossy campus fantasy where the stakes were romantic heartbreak, bruised egos and an inter-college trophy.

In October 2026, the headlines concern a far more disturbing episode — gunfire directed at his vehicle on a Mumbai street, injuries to people around him and a police investigation into who was responsible.

There is no comparison between a fictional action sequence and a real shooting incident.

But revisiting that interview offers a glimpse of Shroff at a very different moment in his career: a young star laughing about the college experience he never had, defending Bollywood's unapologetic escapism and admitting that being pursued by two beautiful women on screen was a dream come true.

It was a conversation about make-believe worlds, larger-than-life heroes and the harmless absurdities of a Bollywood campus.

And for an actor whose professional life has been built on spectacular action, it is a reminder of a time when the drama surrounding him was confined to the screen.

Editor's note: This feature revisits an interview conducted by Manjusha Radhakrishnan for Gulf News and originally published on May 9, 2019, ahead of the UAE release of Student Of The Year 2. The interview has been reframed with updated context following the October 18, 2026, shooting incident in Mumbai. Tiger Shroff was not interviewed again for this article. All interview quotes are from the original reporting.