Kay Kay Menon

Biography

Krishna Kumar Menon (born 2 October 1966), better known by the stage name Kay Kay Menon, is an Indian actor who works predominantly in Hindi cinema, and also in Gujarati, Tamil, Marathi, and Telugu cinema.

Menon was born in a Nair family in Thiruvananthapuram and raised in Ambarnath and Pune, Maharashtra.

He studied at the St. Joseph High School in Khadki, Pune. He passed his 10th grade in 1981. He did his Bachelor's (Physics) from Mumbai University and his MBA from the Department of Management Sciences (PUMBA) at the University of Pune, graduating in 1988 with a major in Marketing.

Menon's initial focus was working in the advertising industry including Kinetic Honda and Marlboro cigarette advertisements in India.

He started his career in theatre productions where he met Nivedita Bhattacharya, whom he married. His first theatre break was opposite Naseeruddin Shah in Feroz Abbas Khan's Mahatma vs Gandhi.

In the early years of his career, Menon worked on television, with roles in the TV movies Zebra 2 and Last Train To Mahakali. He was praised for his role as a young Prime Minister in the Zee TV series Pradhan Mantri (2001), directed by Ketan Mehta.

In The Hindu, Sevanti Ninan wrote, “An actor to watch: Kay Kay Menon ... this unusually tall actor who plays the pradhan mantri is a major saving grace” while in The Tribune, Amita Malik commented, "excellent acting by Menon, who skilfully conveys the physical as well as mental image of the honest politician".

Menon made his big screen debut with a small role in Naseem (1995), followed in 1999 by the lead role in Bhopal Express, a movie that went mostly unnoticed. This was the first in a series of initial setbacks in Menon's film career.

In the early 2000s, he starred as a wicked rock musician in Anurag Kashyap's debut movie, Paanch, which struggled with censorship and has remained unreleased. Two other movies, Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi and Black Friday, had to wait many years for a release date.

Meanwhile, his commercial films Deewar (starring Amitabh Bachchan) and Silsiilay (with Shahrukh Khan) flopped at the box office. It was only in 2005, with the eventual release of the critically acclaimed Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi, but with Ram Gopal Varma's Sarkar, Menon had his break.

Sarkar earned a nomination for Best Performance in a Negative Role at the Filmfare Awards. In The Tribune, Saibal Chatterjee called him "one of Bollywood's finest actors".