Suhaas Ahuja(I)

Suhaas Ahuja hails from a family of theatre practitioners and has been doing theatre since his childhood. A film graduate from Middlebury College, USA, Suhaas began his career in his hometown Chennai as a VJ on a local music channel called Southern Spice Music, during which time he also starred as the lead of an Indian-English romantic comedy called Knock Knock, I'm Looking to Marry (2003) (2003). He moved to Mumbai in 2005 and worked as an assistant director on films & TV while also doing theatre with the prestigious The Company Theatre, after which he worked as a full-time music composer for some years. In 2011, he was cast as the crucial character of Sanjay Kejriwal in Talaash (2012) (2012).

A period of prolific theatre work followed, in which he worked on some high profile theatre productions, such as Sunil Shanbag's adaptation of Carmen, "Club Desire" (2013-17) on which he also worked as composer; and the Indo-French theatre collaboration "Gates to India Song" (2013), directed by Eric Vigner, in which he played the role of the enigmatic Vice-Consul of Lahore, opposite Nandita Das. Other significant productions include the QTP production of "A Peasant of El Salvador" directed by Quasar Thakore-Padamsee that continues to run after opening in 2013; as well as Mike Bartlett's play "Bull", directed by Jim Sarbh, in which he played the role of the doomed protagonist Thomas. In 2017, aided by his skills as a singer, he was cast as Matt of the Mint in Motley's production of "The Threepenny Opera", directed by Imaaduddin Shah. In 2020, he was part of the NCPA production of the Agatha Christie mystery "The Mirror Crack'd" directed by Melly Still, featuring a cast headed by Shernaz Patel, Sonali Kulkarni and Denzil Smith.

In terms of his work in film, TV and web series, Suhaas played the role of Roger in Nikkhil Advani's Katti Batti (2015) (2015). Soon after, Advani also cast him as Salim 'Chachu' in P.O.W. Bandi Yuddh Ke (2016) (2016-17), which was the official Indian adaptation of the Israeli TV show Hatufim: Prisonniers de guerre (2009) (of which, more famously, Homeland (2011) is the American adaptation).

In 2018, Suhaas acted in a short film called Marilyn Lights (2018) directed by Tanmay Singh which showed at numerous festivals across the world and garnered Suhaas four Best Actor awards. Since 2019, he has acted in various OTT web series, most notably Out of Love (2019) on Disney+ Hotstar, and The Married Woman (2021) on Alt Balaji and Zee 5 Premium. For the latter, Suhaas received praise, appreciation and a Best Actor nomination for his performance as Hemant Kapoor, the patriarchal, modern-yet-regressive male protagonist of the show. Suhaas can be seen in the recently released series Shiksha Mandal (2022), helmed by Syed Ahmad Afzal; and the upcoming series Chidiya Udd, helmed by Ravi Jadhav, both on MX Player. Shooting for Zoya Akhtar's highly anticipated feature film The Archies (2023) concluded in December 2022, with the film expected to release in late 2023.

Suhaas also continues to work as a music producer as well as singer-songwriter & frontman for The Suhaas Ahuja Band. In April 2019, the band's single "Phantom In The Fog" was selected as one of 24 finalists from over 1000 entries for Nexa Music Lounge, a competition to showcase the best of English songwriting in India, by industry stalwarts A.R. Rahman and Clinton Cerejo. The band is working towards releasing their debut album in 2023.