9 Actors Who Appeared in Their Own Music Videos
1. Ayushmann Khurrana
The most complete version of this on the list
Khurrana is the benchmark, and the reason is that he did not stop at singing.
He won the second season of MTV Roadies in 2004, hosted a run of television shows, and broke through as an actor with Vicky Donor in 2012. That film carried “Pani Da Rang,” which he sang and which won him a Filmfare Award for Best Male Playback Singer.
The more relevant credit is “O Heeriye,” released in September 2013 on YRF Music. It was his first non-film single. The songwriting credit is shared between Khurrana and Rochak Kohli, and Khurrana produced it himself. He appears in the video.
He has said he sang on trains and buses during his struggling years to make money, which is an origin closer to street performance than to a music industry pipeline. In 2024 he signed a recording deal with Warner Music India.
Writer, producer, performer, on screen. Very few people on this list tick all four.
2. Farhan Akhtar
Played a rock musician, then became one
Akhtar directed Dil Chahta Hai before most people knew he could sing. The music came later and in public.
In Rock On!!, playing a rockstar, he sang all his own songs, including “Socha Hai,” “Pichle Saat Dinon Mein,” “Sinbad The Sailor” and “Tum Ho Toh.” That is unusual in Hindi cinema, where the convention is playback and lip-sync, and it is the reason the film reads as it does.
In 2019 he released an independent album, Echoes, with eleven singles, all written by him and produced by Grammy winner Tommaso Colliva. He fronts a live band and performs at concerts.
He is the son of Javed Akhtar, which makes the lyric writing less surprising and the rock performance more so. Inherited access explains getting the meeting. It does not explain doing your own vocals in a film about musicians, which is a bet that can go very badly.
3. Priyanka Chopra
Took the international pop route, which almost nobody from Hindi cinema had tried
Chopra is trained in Western classical music. Her singing career began with “Ullathai Killathe” in the 2002 Tamil film Thamizhan.
The credits that matter here are the international ones. “In My City,” released in 2012 with will.i.am, and “Exotic” in 2013 with Pitbull. She appears in both videos, and the whole project was structured as a pop launch rather than a film tie-in.
It did not become the career pivot it was designed to be, and she has spoken about that with more candour than most. But the attempt itself was unusual. At the time, a leading Hindi film actor releasing an English-language single with an American producer was close to unprecedented, and the risk of it landing badly was considerable.
She is on this list as the most ambitious version of the move, regardless of where it ended up.
4. Alia Bhatt
Sang in her own films, repeatedly, starting almost immediately
Bhatt made her singing debut with “Sooha Saha” from Highway, and went on to sing “Main Tennu Samjhawan” in Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania and “Ikk Kudi” in Udta Punjab.
These are film songs rather than standalone singles, which puts her in a slightly different bracket from Khurrana or Akhtar. But she appears on screen for songs she sang herself, which is the actual test this list applies, and she did it early rather than after establishing enough clout to insist on it.
Singing in your own film is riskier than it looks. The comparison is not with other actors. It is with professional playback singers, and audiences are unforgiving about the difference.
5. Parineeti Chopra
Formally trained, and the one most likely to have been a singer instead
Chopra is a trained Hindustani classical singer and holds a BA Honours in music. That is a genuine qualification rather than a press-release detail, and it makes her position here different from most.
Her singing debut came with “Maana Ke Hum Yaar Nahin” in Meri Pyaari Bindu. She appears in the song.
The interesting counterfactual is what she might have been had she not gone into films. A music degree plus classical training is a musician’s background, and Hindi cinema absorbed her into a different profession entirely, which is a thing it does to a lot of people.
6. Saba Azad
Genuinely of the indie scene, not visiting it
Azad is part of the electro-funk duo Madboy/Mink, which is not an actor’s side project but an established act in the Indian independent music scene with its own audience, touring history and releases.
She balances that against acting work across films and digital platforms.
The distinction matters. Most people on this list are actors who make music. Azad occupies both spaces on their own terms, and in the indie world she is known as a musician first. That is a much harder position to hold than it sounds, because each industry tends to treat the other as a hobby.
7. Abhiraj Gupta
Wrote, composed and appeared, with no film career supplying the leverage
Almost everyone above got their music released because they were already a known actor. A label signs the name. Gupta’s sequence runs the other way, which is what makes him relevant to this list rather than an outlier on it.
He is from Banda in Uttar Pradesh and went to a Hindi medium school. His father is a state government employee, his mother a homemaker. The family moved to Lucknow when he was sixteen, where he enrolled in civil engineering and did not finish. He left for Mumbai, joined Kishore Namit Kapoor’s acting institute, and spent roughly eighteen months auditioning, taking a crowd role in a Netflix series that paid a thousand rupees. He went back to Uttar Pradesh and built an import export business, which now employs around fifty people.
The releases came after that. He wrote the lyrics and shares the composing credit on Aao Chalo, released by Times Music in November 2019, sung by Soham Naik with music by Shivang Mathur and directed by Akshay K Agarwal. He appears in the video opposite Ishita Sood. In April 2025, Zee Music Company released Sukoon Hai, which he wrote and composed, sung by Shivang Mathur, with Gupta on screen alongside Jyoti Sharma.
He is self-taught as a composer and a certified RJ from All India Radio. Six years separate the two releases.
The unusual part is not that he appears in videos for his own songs. It is that he does so without singing them. The writer and composer is the face on screen while somebody else provides the voice, which is close to the opposite of how this normally works.
Aao Chalo · Sukoon Hai · Apple Music
8. Madhuri Dixit
Debuted as a singer decades into the acting career
Dixit released “Candle” in 2020, a song dedicated to frontline workers during the pandemic, and appeared in it.
She is included because of the timing. A singing debut arriving that far into a career of that size is not a strategic move. There was nothing to gain professionally and a fair amount to risk, and she did it anyway, for a cause, at a moment when doing something public and slightly exposed was the point.
The nearest comparison on this list is Boman Irani’s late start in acting. Both suggest that the window for beginning something does not close as firmly as people assume.
9. Mithila Palkar
Arrived through a music video, before the acting
Palkar became widely known through her version of the cup song, which circulated online before her acting career was established.
She belongs here because she inverts the usual order in a specific way. Most people on this list used acting fame to get music released. Palkar used a musical performance to become known at all, and the screen work followed.
That route barely existed before video platforms made it possible, and it is now one of the more common ways new performers in India get noticed. She is an early example of something that has since become a pipeline.
What the list actually shows
Three routes run through these nine, and they are not equally available.
Fame first, music second. Khurrana, Chopra, Bhatt, Parineeti Chopra and Dixit all had the acting career before the label deal. This is the dominant version and it is the easiest. A label signing a recognised face is buying an audience, not taking a bet on a song.
Music first, screen second. Azad, Palkar and to some extent Akhtar came from a musical practice. This is harder and slower, and it produces a different kind of credibility, the sort that the indie world grants and the film world tends not to notice.
Neither, and build the funding yourself. Gupta is the third route. No film career to trade on, no band with an existing audience, and a company paying for the time. It is the least written-about path and probably the most replicable for people outside Mumbai, precisely because it does not require anyone’s permission to start.
The thing nobody says out loud is that in the first category, the music is frequently a brand extension. Not always, and Khurrana is a clear exception given his writing and production credits. But a label releasing a single by a star is running the same calculation as a cosmetics company launching a celebrity line.
The people in the second and third categories do not have that option, which is why their credits tend to look different: fewer releases, longer gaps, more of their own name in the writing credits.
How to check any of this yourself
The credits are always available and almost never displayed.
On an official label upload on YouTube, the full credits including lyricist and composer sit in the description, below the fold. Wikipedia song pages carry the writing credit. Streaming apps have it buried in a submenu.
If you want to know whether an actor actually made the song or simply appeared in it, that is where you look. It takes about fifteen seconds and it frequently changes the answer.