Every face on screen carries a true story, and some of them are far more dangerous than fiction.
When the trailer for Dhurandhar dropped, audiences were not just watching a spy thriller. They were watching history, covert, classified, and blood-soaked, play out through the lens of Bollywood. Director Aditya Dhar, the same mind behind Uri: The Surgical Strike, has assembled one of the most formidable casts in recent Indian cinema. But what is truly electric about Dhurandhar is the revelation hiding in plain sight: almost every major character appears to be drawn directly from real operatives, militants, gangsters, and politicians who shaped the subcontinent's shadow wars.
Here is a breakdown of the characters in Dhurandhar and the remarkable, sometimes terrifying, real people who inspired them.
Ranveer Singh's Character
Ranveer Singh leads the film in a role that, even in the trailer, refuses to give you a name. That deliberate anonymity is itself a clue. His character, a covert operative conducting missions deep inside Pakistan, is widely believed to be inspired by Major Mohit Sharma, one of India's most decorated soldiers and a posthumous recipient of the Ashok Chakra.
Major Sharma's real story reads like a thriller no screenwriter could fabricate. He infiltrated the ranks of Hizbul Mujahideen, operating under the alias Iftikhar Bhat, feeding intelligence to Indian agencies while embedded with one of Kashmir's most dangerous separatist groups. He was martyred in March 2009 during a counter-insurgency operation in Kupwara, Jammu and Kashmir, but not before eliminating multiple terrorists in a final act of extraordinary courage.
Ranveer, known for physical and emotional extremes in his performances, seems tailor-made for a character who embodies both patriotism and sacrifice. If the film does justice to the real Major Sharma, audiences should brace themselves.
Arjun Rampal as Major Iqbal
Cold eyes. A torture chamber. An unhurried cruelty. Arjun Rampal's Major Iqbal announces himself in the trailer as someone who has made violence into an art form, and his real-life inspiration is arguably even more chilling.
The character appears modelled on Ilyas Kashmiri, a Pakistani militant so feared that counterterrorism officials once called him the "new Osama bin Laden." A former commando turned jihadist, Kashmiri was connected to multiple terror attacks on Indian soil, including the 2008 Mumbai attacks. He had documented ties to both Jaish-e-Mohammed and Al-Qaeda, operating across borders with a level of operational sophistication that baffled intelligence agencies for years.
Kashmiri was reportedly killed in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan in 2011, though even that remains disputed in some circles. The fact that this character opens Dhurandhar with a torture scene suggests the film is not going to soften its edges.
R. Madhavan as Ajay Sanyal
If there is one character in Dhurandhar that audiences will find themselves leaning forward for, it is R. Madhavan's Ajay Sanyal, a senior R&AW officer whose monologue about infiltrating the nerve centres of terrorism is reportedly the most talked-about scene in the trailer.
The character's physical description, a balding head, unassuming spectacles, a quiet intensity that masks extraordinary depth, points almost unmistakably toward Ajit Doval, India's current National Security Advisor and one of the most consequential intelligence figures in the country's post-Independence history.
Doval's real career spans decades of operations that most Indians have never been told about. He played a pivotal role in the 1999 IC-814 hijacking negotiations in Kandahar. He reportedly went undercover in Pakistan for years. He was instrumental in the doctrine behind the 2016 surgical strikes and the 2019 Balakot airstrikes. Madhavan, in playing a man who has clearly seen and done things that will never appear in official records, carries the weight of that legacy. The casting choice is inspired.
Akshaye Khanna as Rehman Dakait
Akshaye Khanna has built a second career playing men you cannot quite read, and Rehman Dakait seems like his most layered role yet. A gangster-politician hybrid who brags about killing "like a butcher," the character is drawn from one of Karachi's most notorious real-life criminals: Sardar Abdul Rehman Baloch, known simply as Rehman Dakait.
Born into a family with deep roots in the drug trade, Dakait clawed his way up through the underworld before performing an almost absurd transformation, founding the People's Aman Committee, a so-called peace organisation that critics alleged was a front for extortion and political influence in the volatile Lyari neighbourhood of Karachi.
He was killed in a police encounter in 2009, but conspiracy theories about who actually ordered the hit and why persist to this day. That ambiguity makes him perfect film material, and Khanna's ability to project menace through sheer stillness means this performance could be one of the year's standouts.
Sanjay Dutt as SP Chaudhary Aslam
Nobody in Indian cinema carries physical authority quite like Sanjay Dutt, and casting him as SP Chaudhary Aslam, a fearless Pakistani police officer, is a masterstroke of intuition.
The role is based on Chaudhry Aslam Khan, an encounter specialist who became a legend in Karachi for his relentless pursuit of militant networks and underworld kingpins. Operating in one of the world's most dangerous urban environments, Aslam survived multiple assassination attempts, car bombs, ambushes, targeted killings and continued his operations with a ferocity that his enemies found incomprehensible.
He was finally killed in a massive bomb blast in January 2014, claimed by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. He was escorting a journalist when the IED detonated. Dutt's portrayal will have to capture both the heroism and the fatalism of a man who knew the odds and kept going anyway.
The Supporting Cast
Danish Pandor plays Uzair Baloch
Danish Pandor plays Uzair Baloch, a Pakistani gangster based on the real-life Lyari underworld figure of the same name, central to the film's "Operation Lyari" narrative thread. Rakesh Bedi portrays Jameel Jamali, a character believed to be inspired by former Pakistani MNA Nabil Gabol, who has reportedly criticised the portrayal as inaccurate. And Vivek Sinha plays Zahoor Mistry, based on real hijacker Zahoor Mistry, also known as Zahid Akhund, one of the five men who seized Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 in 1999 and diverted it to Kandahar. This event remains one of the most traumatic episodes in modern Indian aviation history and still carries raw emotional weight for millions of families.
The inclusion of these supporting characters suggests that Dhurandhar is not just a star-vehicle thriller. It is attempting something more ambitious: a mosaic portrait of an entire era of covert conflict, regional crime, and geopolitical brinkmanship.
India has always had a complex relationship with its own recent history, the operations too sensitive to acknowledge, the martyrs too covert to celebrate publicly, the villains too politically inconvenient to name. Cinema, at its best, fills that space.
With Aditya Dhar directing, and a cast that includes Ranveer Singh, R. Madhavan, Sanjay Dutt, Arjun Rampal, and Akshaye Khanna operating at what appears to be collective peak intensity, Dhurandhar has both the raw material and the execution to become something genuinely significant.
Every character in this film is more than a fictional construct. They are echoes, sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes heroic, always human, of men who existed, operated in the shadows, and in several cases died so that others could remain unaware of what was done in their name.
That is not just good cinema. That is the kind of story that deserves to be told.
Also Read: Dhurandhar 2 Box Office Collection Day 1: Biggest Bollywood Opener Ever
