Khan is Bollywood's dude du jour. Three years in the business, he has had 11 releases, many of them successful. The latest, Karan Arjun, is predicted to gross over Rs 50 crore. Recently, a Movie-magazine opinion poll of 10,000 respondents ranked him as the nation's favourite hero after Amitabh Bachchan.
And last month, he won his fourth Filmfare Award. This time the best villain for his role of a psychopathic lover in Anjaam. Beating powerhouse actors such as Naseeruddin Shah and Paresh Rawal to the prize, Khan created history of sorts - he's the first Hindi film hero to win in the villain category.
Khan's market value is soaring and, naturally, everybody wants him. He has six films on the floor, works two shifts a day and has no open dates till October '96. But that deters few. A steady stream of directors - and a London-based promoter, Farhad Hussain, who is offering Rs 1.5 crore for 21 days of shows in Europe and America - drop by.
Studio technicians, reliable industry sources, refer to the 29-year-old as "Khan saab". Fans send him 75 letters a day and two months ago, an aging couple from Latur showed up at his gate, claiming to be his long-lost parents.
Khan has won the game by breaking the rules. The first television actor to cross over into big-league stardom, he has made a career out of rejected roles. Armaan Kohli was meant to play the dashing industrialist son in Deewana, Khan's debut.
Vivek Mushran and Aamir Khan were original choices for the Shri 420 remake, Raju Ban Gaya Gentleman. Afraid of tinkering with a traditional 70mm image, Aamir rejected the obsessed lover's role in Darr and Salman Khan refused to play the blood-thirsty avenger in Baazigar. Khan grabbed both and reinvented the Hindi film hero.
But then, he has consistently stretched the strait jacket, and successfully straddled commercial and parallel cinema - a feat not even Bachchan could manage. The first film he signed was Ketan Mehta's Madame Bovary-inspired Maya Memsaab.
Later, he did Mani Kaul's Ahmak, based on Dostoyevsky's The Idiot, and Kundan Shah's bitter-sweet Kabhi Haan, Kabhi Naa. These days, he is shooting for directors as varied as Aziz Mirza, Mahesh Bhatt, Mukul Anand and Subhash Ghai, and has become all things to all people.
Anand calls him "the new face of the industry" and "the face of the disciplined actor I can put forward to the corporate world". Bhatt calls him "a dynamo" and Mehta sees him as "a modern actor".
"He is not restricted by the method school of acting. He can portray several experiences simultaneously and has an instinctive tuning with the times. He is the mascot for the '90s," says Mehta. Khan breaks into a dimpled smile when asked what the magic is. "I don't know. I'm on a roll, and all I can say is, 'God, don't let the good times stop'."
The explanation, perhaps, lies in his boundless energy. Khan never pauses. Fuelled by an improbable diet of caffeine, cigarettes and chicken, he shuffles constantly and enacts rather than speaks. The limpid brown eyes are always scanning the surroundings. Sleep, he says, is a waste of time.
On-screen, the energy translates into rapid-fire speech, quivering lips, nonstop gesticulation. It almost compels the viewer to keep watching. His vitality gives Khan an edge over his co-stars and makes him unpredictable. So the endearing, vulnerable, boy next door turns into an equally convincing psychopath. Says Bhatt: "Innocence plus manic energy - that is Shah Rukh's voice."
Energy translates into style, and for Khan "style is prime". "I don't believe in acting that doesn't have style," he says. "I'm not into becoming the character. I will always be Khan playing the beggar or goonda or villager." This, however, has its limitations.
Style makes a star but substance makes the actor and critics are already harping on Khan's often overdone mannerisms. Kundan Shah believes they have populist appeal.
"Mannerisms endear you to an audience," says Shah, "but they can also become a pitfall. Khan's persona is becoming bigger than the roles, so the script must adjust to the actor. The actor doesn't adjust to the script." Not one for introspection, Khan is, at first, open to the criticism: "I have only five or six expressions... yes, it is a limitation as an actor." And then, expectedly bratty: "I know people think I'm gimmicky. B...to them."
The arrogance was in place even when Khan was a Rs 8,000-per-episode TV actor. Producer Vivek Vaswani remembers meeting him in a suburban Bombay coffee shop in '91. "He was very clear that he didn't want to do films. But the attitude was, I'm the greatest actor in the world and there is no argument over it'." His friends say that his startling ascent in filmdom hasn't altered much.
He now lives in a penthouse overlooking the sea and is contemplating buying a BMW, but underneath the trappings, the public school-educated Delhi boy remains the same.
Sitting in his colour-coordinated black-and-white living room, he is able to mock fame. When a masseuse, who has been waiting all morning to tone up his shoulder muscles, voices impatience, Khan turns to wife Gauri and says: "Please tell her, I am the star."