Do we like Shah Rukh Khan?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record and real charity work; the gaps are that we found no public stance on LGBTQ+ rights and only a thin record on the planet.
Shah Rukh Khan was born in New Delhi in 1965 and started on television, with the army series Fauji in 1989 and then Circus. He went on to define 1990s and early 2000s Hindi cinema with films like Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham. He is probably the biggest movie star on the planet by sheer audience size.
The arc since is the good bit. He headlined no film between Zero in 2018 and Pathaan in January 2023, then came back with Pathaan and Jawan, which Free Press Journal reports each passed ₹1,000 crore worldwide. He called himself “the last of the stars” in a chat with critic Rajeev Masand, which is either cheek or truth, probably both.
The latest stoush was in January 2026, when his IPL team Kolkata Knight Riders bought Bangladeshi bowler Mustafizur Rahman. Some religious and political figures branded Khan a traitor over the signing, linking it to violence against Hindus in Bangladesh. The cricket board then told KKR to release the player, and The Week explained the franchise couldn't drop him on its own. We couldn't find Khan commenting himself, so there's no quote to judge him on.
On harm, the record is clean as far as we could find. Nothing turned up of him campaigning against any group, pushing conspiracy theories or platforming people who do. Speaking to the BBC's HARDtalk in 2018, he said “nobody dared misbehave with a woman on my set, I am very clear on that.” The honest gap is LGBTQ+ rights: we found no public stance from him either way, and nothing on climate.
On the courts, the main case we opened was a 2017 criminal case over a stampede at Vadodara railway station while he was promoting Raees. The Supreme Court upheld the Gujarat High Court's quashing of it in September 2022. In January 2026 the Delhi High Court also threw out a defamation suit by a former drugs agency officer against his production company Red Chillies and Netflix over a series, purely because Delhi wasn't the right place to hear it. That's a technical win, not a ruling on the merits.
The good stuff is real. He founded the Meer Foundation in 2013, named after his father, and it has helped pay for treatment and work for acid attack survivors, with about 120 women being supported in 2019. That's the kind of cause that doesn't earn a film star much glory.