Do we like Nawazuddin Siddiqui?
Our score: 6 out of 10. Nothing harmful in his own words and a good record on trans representation, but unresolved family-court mess keeps the nice test murky.
Nawazuddin Siddiqui was born on 19 May 1974 in Budhana, in Uttar Pradesh's Muzaffarnagar district, into a landowning Muslim family and the eldest of eight siblings. Cinema was nowhere near the family plan. He studied chemistry and worked as a chemist in Vadodara before a play pulled him to Delhi and theatre.
The road after that was brutal. He did more than ten plays to qualify for the National School of Drama, then got knocked back in Mumbai for not looking like a Hindi film hero. He took uncredited bits, odd jobs including watchman, and cramped flats. Nearly a decade in, Gangs of Wasseypur broke him through, and The Lunchbox and Bajrangi Bhaijaan cemented the reputation for layered, understated work.
The mess is mostly at home. His estranged wife Aaliya went public in early 2023 with claims that his family wouldn't let her stay at his Mumbai home, and told of a complaint she said she had filed with the police. His mother filed a counter-complaint over an alleged property dispute. He has mostly kept quiet, posting a long note saying he is “termed as a bad guy everywhere” because of his silence. A separate complaint Aaliya brought in Uttar Pradesh was investigated, police gave him a clean chit in their final report, and a court summoned her to respond.
Earlier, in 2016, a neighbour accused him of pushing her during a parking-space dispute. He and his manager called the allegations false, and his side filed a cross-complaint. That's the whole public record I could verify, and none of it has produced a conviction against him.
On the harm test, there's nothing nasty in his own words that I could find. He played a trans woman in Haddi and said he worked with more than 80 real-life trans women, calling it “an honour and a privilege”. A Gaysi opinion piece disagreed, arguing his cross-dressing roles carry the “hollow performativeness of allyship”, but that's a critic's reading of his roles, not something he said.
The recent stoush is the March 2026 'fake films' remark. Asked at NDTV's Creators' Manch about filmmakers' duty to society, he said some current films are fake, and X users took it as a swipe at Dhurandhar and The Kerala Story. He named neither, so where you land depends on whether you read it as a call for honest cinema or as a jab at specific films.