33 year old Kartavya actor mistaken for child artiste tops IMDb rankings and beat SRK and Vijay

When Netflix’s Kartavya landed on May 15, most people tuned in for Saif Ali Khan. What they didn’t expect was to spend the next few days trying to find out who played Harpal, the 6-year-old Haryanvi boy at the centre of the film whose abuse and manipulation drives the entire story.

The searches for Yudhvir Ahlawat surged so sharply after Kartavya’s release that he climbed to the top of IMDb India’s popularity rankings, overtaking major stars including Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Thalapathy Vijay and Shah Rukh Khan. Jr NTR and Mohanlal also found themselves displaced on the list by a man, yes not a child but a man, most people had never heard of a fortnight ago.

The reason so many people were searching for him in the first place is telling. Audiences watching Kartavya broadly assumed Yudhvir was a child actor, his youthful appearance and portrayal of an abused boy led viewers to believe he was much younger than he actually is. He is, in fact, 33 years old. And he has been working in theatre and films for nearly a decade.

Yudhvir Ahlawat in a still from Kartavya.

From a BSF household in Haryana to the Mughal-e-Azam stage

Yudhvir Ahlawat comes from Sheriya, a village in Jhajjar, Haryana. His father, Gyan Singh Ahlawat, served in the Border Security Force (BSF). Unlike the rest of his family, Yudhvir chose acting as a career. He is shorter than his brothers and has a youthful face, which often makes people think he is much younger than his actual age.

For nearly eight years, he has been associated with director Feroz Abbas Khan’s stage production Mughal-E-Azam: The Musical, performing across India and on international stages.

Alongside his stage work, he began his screen journey with the 2019 biographical drama Saand Ki Aankh, the Taapsee Pannu and Bhumi Pednekar film, in which he played Chandro Tomar’s son. He followed that with Ranbir Kapoor’s Shamshera and then earned wider recognition for his role as Rakesh Dilawar in the crime thriller Love Hostel alongside Bobby Deol and Vikrant Massey, a performance noted for its intensity and realism.

In 2025, he appeared in the youth comedy series Co-Ed on Amazon MX Player. None of these, though, prepared anyone for what Kartavya would do to his profile.

Take a look at Kartavya’s trailer:

The role that changed everything

In Kartavya, Harpal is a boy being mentally and physically abused, manipulated into committing murder. It’s a character that requires enormous vulnerability and control in equal measure. It is not a showy role. It doesn’t announce itself. It works by getting under your skin quietly and by the time you realise how deeply the performance has landed, it’s already done its work.

Many viewers genuinely believed Yudhvir was a teenager rather than a 33-year-old man, which shows how completely he got into the character. In 2019, when Saand Ki Aankh released, he had said in an interview that people often thought he was a child even when he was 28. What once seemed like a limitation in other roles actually became exactly what Kartavya needed.

What the IMDb moment actually means

IMDb’s popularity list tracks the most-visited celebrity profiles globally each week. While actors with theatrical releases typically dominate, Yudhvir’s climb to the top was driven entirely by audience curiosity, people finishing Kartavya and immediately going to find out who Harpal actually was.

It is, in its own way, the best kind of recognition an actor can receive. Not marketing, not a PR campaign, not a viral clip engineered for social media. Just a performance that made enough people ask a question, and then go looking for the answer.

Yudhvir Ahlawat has spent years building a career across theatre, television and cinema. Kartavya appears to be the moment when all of that preparation finally met the right audience at the right time.

Whether the film industry moves quickly enough to give him what comes next is the more interesting question.

– Ends