Kay Kay Menon has aged, and badly. The pursed smile that was so charming not too long ago now only draws unwelcome attention to his sunken cheeks. Irrfan has aged too, and nicely, but then he always looked older than his years. There’s a vacancy now open for the thinking woman’s pin-up and there are many contenders – Vinay Pathak, Ranvir Shorey, Deepak Dobriyal. While they are all talented and watchable, none of them make hearts throb. There is Abhay Deol, but Bollywood has claimed him. There are new faces like Neil Bhoopalam and Gulshan Devaiah, but they are still boys. What is the connoiseur of the serious and seriously dishy actor supposed to do?

Enter Adil Hussain. The actor packs together camera-friendly looks with a reputation built on the stage. He is a very late bloomer – he is 49 – but he doesn’t look his age. His timing couldn’t have been better. There will never be too many stars, but there is always a dearth of talent to fill in parts written for the Naseeruddin Shahs and Om Puris of today. Hussain has successfully filled the gap: he has appeared in Italian filmmaker Italo Spinneli’s Gangor and in Unni Vijayan’s Lessons in Forgetting, which will be shown at the National Centre for the Performing Arts this fortnight. Hussain will also be seen in Ang Lee’s Life of Pi and Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Most recently, he waded into the mainstream with Sriram Raghavan’s Agent Vinod. Hussain made his mark in a movie that at times was busier than a peak-hour local train, in the role of the suave villain Captain. “Frankly, his audition wasn’t fantastic, but he had a striking yet nondescript feel and he is very watchable,” Raghavan said.

Speaking on the phone from Goa while on a working vacation for Partho Ghosh’s underdevelopment Sunrise, Hussain acknowledged that his days of invisibility are over, probably for good. The mobs aren’t tearing down his door just yet, but he is starting to get noticed. “I had a moustache on [for a role] and there is this couple looking at me,” he said. “The man walks up to me and asks me if I am Captain. I say yes. The man turns to his wife and says, ‘See, you lost your bet’.”

Hussain brings to the screen a lifetime of work in stand-up comedy and theatre in Goalpara in Assam, where he grew up, and of stage work in Delhi, where he studied at the National School of Drama and where he remains a visiting professor. Theatregoers knew him from Roysten Abel’s plays Othello in Black and White and Goodbye Desdemona. Unlike other NSD alumni, Hussain took his time to approach cinema. “I have been trained to do layered and complex roles,” he said. “There is a tendency to think that you’re better than people in the mainstream. This isn’t necessarily true. Take what Govinda does with one movement of his leg. I can’t do that.”

Hussain had tiny roles in Abhishek Chaubey’s Ishqiya (as Vidya Balan’s husband) and Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kaminey (as a flight purser). Before Agent Vinod, he appeared in Sona Jain’s independent feature For Real as a psychiatrist trapped in a bad marriage. When Jain first met Hussain, he had long, curly hair that fell to his waist. “He looked like a Zen master,” Jain recalled. Hussain had come to meet Jain straight from a theatre residency in Hampi in Karnataka. He had been at Hampi between 2004 and 2007, finding a way to “find a perpetual reservoir of creativity”, to create the ability to “deliver on demand”. The residency included acting workshops and meditation – the latter benefitted Jain in ways she didn’t initially imagine.

Jain had initially auditioned Hussain for a smaller role. When she approached him for the lead, the deep-voiced actor was hesitant. He then told her that he had “meditated keenly” and “that it was told to him that it would be very important to do her film”, Jain said. A haircut at Ambika Pillai’s salon took care of Hussain’s tresses, and an alt pin-up was born. “A lot of people, especially women, have told me about his killer good looks, but for me, it’s about the essence of Adil and the character he plays,” she said.

There will be plenty of opportunities to gauge the full range of Hussain’s talent in the coming months. He recently finished Aditya Bhattacharya’s Bombay Most Wanted and will now shoot for Vikramaditya Motwane’s Lootera. A light-hearted role in Gauri Shinde’s upcoming English Vinglish may help him break out of the intense image trap he has acquired. “I have been trained as a clown,” Hussain pointed out. “I did stand-up comedy [in Assam] for six years. I started getting intense roles after Othello.”

Despite vast experience within a short time span, Hussain says he is still grappling with the mysteries of cinema. “In filmmaking, there is no linear process of shooting and you don’t know the journey” of the role, he said. “In theatre, you have rehearsals and you do one scene in a hundred different ways.” Part of his learning process has been to comprehend the role the camera plays in capturing performances. “I am slowly understanding the lens,” he said. “I still don’t know how close is close.”