Sonu Sood: The Screen Villain Who Became a Real-Life Hero

Sonu Sood built his film career on playing antagonists, and in 2020 acquired a different reputation altogether. His Wikipedia biography covers both. This piece follows it, using only what it states and leaving out claims it makes without support.

From Moga to engineering

According to the biography, Sood was born on 30 July 1973. He was educated at Sacred Heart School in Moga, Punjab, and earned a [B.Tech](http://B.Tech) in electronics engineering at Yashwantrao Chavan College of Engineering. He works predominantly in Hindi, Telugu and Tamil films and is known for playing the negative lead in most of them.

South first, then Hindi

His career began in 1999 with two Tamil films, Kallazhagar and Nenjinile. He played an antagonist in the Telugu film Hands Up! in 2000 and appeared in Majunu in 2001. His first Hindi film was Shaheed-E-Azam (2002), in which he played Bhagat Singh. He earned recognition as Abhishek Bachchan's brother in Mani Ratnam's Yuva (2004) and in Aashiq Banaya Aapne (2005).

In Telugu cinema, Super (2005), in which he played a high-tech thief opposite Nagarjuna, brought greater recognition, followed by Athadu and Ashok (2006). In 2009 he played Pasupathy in Arundhati and Rajkumar Sujamal in Jodhaa Akbar. In 2010 he played the lead antagonist in Dabangg, with Salman Khan. His Kannada debut, Vishnuvardhana (2011), with Sudeep, received positive reviews. His other credits include Dookudu (2011), Shootout at Wadala (2013), Happy New Year (2014), Simmba (2018) and Kurukshetra (2019).

Awards

For Arundhati he received the Andhra Pradesh State Nandi Award for Best Villain and the Filmfare Award for Best Supporting Actor, Telugu, in 2009. For Dabangg he won the Apsara Award for Best Actor in a Negative Role and the IIFA Award for Best Performance in a Negative Role in 2010. In 2012 he received the SIIMA Award for Best Actor in a Negative Role in Telugu for Julayi.

Business and television

He appeared in commercials for Apollo Tyres and Airtel, and in July 2016 founded Shakti Sagar Productions, named after his father. In April 2022 he hosted MTV Roadies Season 18 in South Africa. The biography also says the Election Commission appointed him state icon of Punjab.

The pandemic

In May 2020, during the nationwide lockdown, Sood helped thousands of stranded migrant workers reach their homes by arranging buses, special trains and chartered flights. In July 2020 he arranged a chartered flight bringing over 1,500 Indian students stranded in Kyrgyzstan from Bishkek to Varanasi, and in August 2020 helped 101 medical students stranded in Moscow reach Chennai. The biography says he was hailed as a real-life hero in India. In September 2020 the UNDP chose him for its SDG Special Humanitarian Action Award for this work.

His later initiatives include the Sood Charity Foundation, a free UPSC coaching programme, the SANKALP free coaching programme for law entrance exams, a job website and app called Pravasi Rojgar, and Ilaaj India, a healthcare platform launched in February 2021. In December 2020 he published an autobiographical book, I Am No Messiah.

A note on sources

The biography's sections on the charity foundation include unsourced and critical statements about how it operates. Those are not repeated here. The figures for the number of people helped in 2020 come from the biography and from press coverage at the time, and are not independently audited.

Sources

*Cover photo: Laura Lee Dooley, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).*