Imran Khan, the Dad: A Bollywood Veteran Reorders Fatherhood Around a 12-Year-Old and a Younger Co-Star Girlfriend
A 44-year-old former leading man of Hindi cinema is reshaping his public identity around parenting, even as his relationship with a younger actress draws the industry's gaze.
On the morning of 27 June 2026, the actor Imran Khan used a Parenting Month exclusive to do something Hindi cinema rarely permits its leading men: talk about a child. Khan, 44, opened up to the Hindustan Times about raising his 12-year-old daughter Imara, about how the rhythms of single fatherhood have reshaped his career decisions, and about the delicate logistics of introducing a new partner — his girlfriend, also an actress — to a tween who is, by every industry account, already media-literate.
The interview is not, on its face, a film-industry story. It is a parenting story that happens to be filed under Bollywood because the parents are recognisable. But the framing is doing more work than the headline suggests. A former leading man is choosing, at a moment when most of his contemporaries are still chasing leading-man parts, to be interviewed as a father. That is a quiet kind of retirement, and a deliberate one.
The new shape of a leading man's week
Khan was among the more bankable romantic leads of the late-2000s and early-2010s Hindi film industry, a generation that also produced Ranbir Kapoor, Ranveer Singh, and a younger, more internet-native cohort whose careers Khan is no longer competing with for screen time. The Parenting Month feature, as published by Hindustan Times on 27 June 2026, foregrounds his daily life with Imara: school runs, the negotiation of screen-time rules, and what Khan describes as the effort to keep his daughter grounded in a city where most of her classmates' parents are recognisable faces.
The shape of his working week, Khan told the paper, is now organised around Imara's. Productions that require long stretches on location have become harder to take. Auditions that demand a 30-day commitment can be deferred; auditions that demand 90 are off the table. The economics of this are not trivial. Hindi cinema pays its male leads by the schedule, and a lead who is unavailable for the schedule is, functionally, a co-lead or a character actor.
A younger partner, a public industry
The more combustible thread in the interview is the girlfriend. Khan has been open, in recent months, about a relationship with an actress considerably younger than him; the Hindustan Times parenting feature addresses that relationship through the lens of how he approached introducing her to Imara. The framing — "how he approached introducing girlfriend" — is the paper's, not Khan's, and it is worth pausing on. Hindi film publications have a long history of treating younger-actress pairings as the woman's biography rather than the man's. That the paper anchors the question on Khan's paternal decision-making is a small but real departure.
There is, of course, a counter-reading. A 44-year-old man using a parenting platform to discuss a younger girlfriend is, in 2026, still a magazine cover. Industry watchers will read the piece as much for what it says about Khan's private life as for what it says about his parenting. That is not a misreading. It is, however, a reading that flattens the rest of the interview.
What the industry is actually watching
The Hindustan Times feature lands in a Mumbai film industry that is itself restructuring around parenthood — though, as the paper's coverage makes plain, almost entirely on the mothers' side. Working-mother stories still dominate the celebrity-parenting pages. Fathers are interviewed when they are widowed, separated, or otherwise unusual; the default Hindi-cinema father remains a provider who does not, in public, do the school run.
Khan's interview sits inside that gap. He is a separated father with primary custody of a daughter, in a public relationship, in an industry that has historically not asked its male stars to talk about nappy cream. The fact that the Hindustan Times parenting desk could pitch and run this feature, and that Khan agreed to be its subject, suggests both a writer and a reader who now expect the genre to widen. That is not nothing. It is also not a movement; it is one feature, in one paper, in one month.
Stakes and what's still unclear
The stakes of the piece, in the most literal sense, are modest. Khan's next screen role is not contingent on his parenting column. But the cultural stakes are larger. If the parenting pages of major Hindi publications can credibly run a male lead on the strength of his fatherhood alone — no film release, no box-office number, no controversy — that is a small expansion of which male stars are allowed to be publicly domestic.
What the Hindustan Times feature does not resolve, and what this publication cannot independently verify from the source material, is how Imara herself has responded to the relationship or to the increased press around her father. She is twelve. The interview is constructed around her without, in any meaningful sense, being about her. Whether that is respectful or evasive depends on whom one asks.
Desk note: Monexus treats this as a parenting-culture story rather than a Bollywood-gossip story because that is what the source material — a parenting-month exclusive in a serious wire-adjacent paper — supports. The celebrity relationship is in the frame because the paper put it there, and the counter-reading is in the frame because it is the obvious one; neither is allowed to crowd out the structural point.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://t.me/s/hindustantimes