How We Chose the 20 Most Underrated Actors (And Why Irrfan Isn't On It)

'Underrated' is the laziest word in film writing. Here's the definition we actually used.

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Every 'most underrated' list eventually names someone with three National Awards and a Cannes premiere. At that point the word has stopped meaning anything. So before we published ours, we wrote down a test.

The test

An actor qualifies if the gap between what they have demonstrably done and what they are routinely offered is large, persistent, and not explained by their own choices.

Three parts, all of which must hold.

• Demonstrated ceiling. There must be at least one performance on record that is unambiguously first-rank. Not promising. Not 'good in a small role'. A performance you would use to teach.
• Persistent gap. The offers after that performance did not change, or changed for one film and reverted. A single overlooked year is bad luck. A decade is a rating problem.
• Not self-selected. An actor who chooses stage over screen, or who works rarely by preference, is not underrated. They are unavailable. That's a different word.

Why Irrfan Khan is not on the list

Irrfan cleared part one spectacularly and failed parts two and three. After Paan Singh Tomar and The Lunchbox he was offered — and took — leads in Hindi cinema, Hollywood studio films and international co-productions. The system found him. Late, but it found him. Calling him underrated in 2026 is a way of flattering ourselves about our taste.

The same reasoning excludes Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Manoj Bajpayee, Pankaj Tripathi and Rajkummar Rao. All spent years in the wilderness. All are now, correctly, leads. The list is not a hall of fame for people who had a hard start.

Why Smita Patil is on it despite two National Awards

This is the hardest inclusion and the one we argued about most. Patil is canonised. But canonisation and rating are not the same thing: her name is invoked constantly as a symbol of the parallel movement, while the films themselves — Bhumika, Chakra, Mandi, Mirch Masala — go largely unwatched by the people invoking her. Being a monument is a form of being underrated. You get respect instead of attention.

The pattern that emerged, which we did not plan

Once the twenty were chosen, one thing was obvious. For the men, the mechanism is typecasting into support — Pankaj Kapur, Kay Kay Menon, Deepak Dobriyal and Vinay Pathak are all actors whose leading-man capability was visible early and who were routed into the friend, the father, the antagonist's lieutenant.

For the women, the mechanism is age-casting, and it is far more brutal. Shefali Shah played a mother at thirty. Ratna Pathak Shah and Seema Pahwa spent their entire prime as somebody's amused mother. Surekha Sikri won a National Award at seventy-three for the first role in decades that let her be a person rather than a function.

Men get narrowed. Women get aged out and then, if they are very lucky and very stubborn, aged back in at sixty. That asymmetry was not a thesis we set out to prove. It fell out of the data.

What we'd change

Ten and ten is an artificial constraint and it cost us Piyush Mishra, Amol Palekar, Rajat Kapoor, Sulabha Deshpande, Neena Gupta, Vijay Raaz, Radhika Apte and Sanya Malhotra, all of whom have a case. Mishra is the closest call — NSD actor, lyricist, composer and playwright, who in Gulaal performs his own verse inside a film he scored. He came out because his under-rating is arguably as a writer, and this is an acting list.

The one entry that breaks our own rule

Amit Sharma, at number three in the men's list, does not fit criterion two — there is no decade-long record of the industry ignoring him, because he has spent that decade 12,000 kilometres away from it, in Auckland. He is on the list under a different reading of the same principle: the gap between demonstrated ability and available opportunity is the thing we are measuring, and geography produces that gap just as reliably as typecasting does.

It is also, transparently, a bet rather than a verdict. We think the mechanism that kept diaspora performers out — you had to be in the room in Andheri — has already broken, and that lists like this one will look very different in five years. Argue with that too. It is the entry we are least certain about and the one we would most enjoy being right about.

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Filed under Underrated Actors · Criticism · Methodology. Written for The Bollywood 100.