There’s a strange kind of success that arrives not with applause, but with death threats.
Akash Makhija actor, voice artist, and a man who once rode two local trains daily from Kalyan to Andheri just to audition for roles he didn’t get is now the most hated man on Indian OTT. Not because he failed. Because he succeeded so completely at playing evil that viewers genuinely want him gone.
Welcome to the paradox of Babu.
The Character Who Thinks the World Belongs to Him
In Amazon Prime Video‘s Raakh a haunting crime thriller directed by Prosit Roy, inspired by a real Delhi murder from the 1970s, Akash plays Babu, a predator who doesn’t consider himself a villain for a single second. He’s not brooding. He’s not tortured. He’s not a product of visible trauma with a tragic backstory designed to earn your sympathy. Babu simply believes the world is his, and everyone else is a supporting character in his personal story.
“He is a narcissist, and he believes the world revolves around him,” Akash told IANS. “He has this main character energy. Whatever he wants, he hunts it. Not even once did I feel I should sympathize with him.”
This is rarer than it sounds. Most actors playing antagonists on Indian OTT spend half their interviews explaining why their character “had reasons.” Akash went the opposite direction and that counter-instinct is precisely why Babu crawls under your skin and stays there.
The director handed him a deceptively simple, wildly effective brief: Babu is a mixture of multiple animals snake, tiger, fox depending on the situation. Akash took that literally. Every scene, he asked himself which animal was present. That quiet, shapeshifting quality is what makes Babu feel genuinely dangerous rather than dramatically dangerous. He doesn’t announce himself. He adapts.
When the Audience Forgets You’re Acting
Here’s what no one tells you about playing a character with “main character energy”: the audience starts treating you like the character is real.
After Raakh released, Akash opened his Instagram DMs to find messages from people threatening to kill him. Not angry reviews. Actual threats. “The audience has accepted Babu,” he said plainly. “I am aware he’s the most hated character in the nation right now. Some messages say that when Jayprakash was beating him, they were cheering.”
Think about that for a moment. People cheered watching a fictional character be beaten, a character they also can’t stop thinking about. That’s not hate. That’s obsession. And obsession, in the OTT economy, is the highest currency.
The irony? The man receiving these messages is someone whose guiding artistic instinct has always been to humanize, not horrify. “My approach was always to humanize the character,” Akash has said. “Not make him look like a hero or a villain. I kept my personal judgement aside and stayed truthful to his reality.”
The most frightening monsters in fiction are the ones who don’t know they’re monsters. Akash understood this on a cellular level.
Two Local Trains, a ₹100 Note, and Ten Years of Auditions
Here’s the part of the story that the OTT fame tends to quietly swallow.
Akash Makhija is from Kalyan not South Mumbai, not a film family dinner table, not a Bollywood drawing room. He studied mass media at R.D. National College, did three years of theatre, and then spent a decade commuting from Kalyan to Andheri, two train changes each way to audition for roles he mostly didn’t get.
“I travelled from Kalyan to Andheri every day for 10 years just to audition,” he has said candidly. “Most days I came back home without even giving a single audition. As an outsider, even getting a chance to audition for a role is a huge thing.”
There were days: real, documented days when he survived on ₹100 in his pocket. Not ₹100 to spare. ₹100 total.
His entry into the industry wasn’t a dramatic discovery or a nepotism shortcut. It was a TV ad that a Balaji Productions casting team happened to notice in 2012. That got him into Gumrah. Then came Crime Patrol episodes, a dozen rejections, a Cadbury ad here, a McDonald’s spot there. He literally voiced Shinchan in Hindi not as a quirky side gig, but as a working actor using every available skill to pay his rent while he waited for a story worth telling.
He watched Hera Pheri more than 50 times as a child, mimicking Paresh Rawal’s Baburao. That obsession became theatre. Theatre became auditions. Auditions became a Filmfare OTT nomination for Nirmal Pathak Ki Ghar Wapsi in 2023. And now, in 2026, he’s the face people are sending death threats to which, in its own twisted way, is the greatest compliment the OTT era can offer.
The Hidden Reality of OTT’s “Overnight” Breakouts
What Akash Makhija’s story quietly dismantles is the myth of the OTT breakthrough, the idea that digital platforms are this great democratizing force that spot raw talent instantly. They can be. But Akash’s path took fourteen years of groundwork before Raakh handed him the room he needed.
The OTT era didn’t discover him. It finally displayed him to the audience that was always going to find him eventually.
And here’s the exception that proves the rule: the character that broke him through isn’t a hero, a romantic lead, or an aspirational figure. It’s someone the audience actively loathes. Indian mainstream entertainment spent decades insisting that audiences needed to like the hero to love the show. Raakh proved, with Babu, that audiences will devour a show trying to understand and despise the villain.
What Makes Akash Makhija Worth Watching Next
The reason to follow this actor isn’t Babu. Babu is the proof. The reason is that Akash Makhija has consistently resisted the gravity of type-casting comedy in Har Mard Ka Dard, a warm coming-of-age role in Nirmal Pathak, a mass media graduate who voices cartoons and anchors ads and then pivots to playing someone who makes a nation’s skin crawl.
That range doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when an actor has spent a decade in relative obscurity with nothing to protect except his craft.
He once said his inspiration to act wasn’t a great actor, it was a single character: Paresh Rawal’s Baburao. A comic fool who could hold an entire cinema hall in his pocket. Now, Akash plays a Babu of a very different kind. One that holds a nation’s anxiety in his hands.
Same instinct. Completely opposite frequency.
That’s the real story of Akash Makhija not the struggle alone, not the breakthrough alone, but the stubborn, animal intelligence that connected the two.
Raakh is currently streaming on Amazon Prime Video.