Lest you term his move away from Raj as reinvention, Khan gets into self-deprecating mode. “I don’t understand the term ‘reinvention.’ The word invention by its definition means something new. I don’t know how to do new new? It’s either new or not new. Everything that is new for you is already old for someone else,” he says.

So he views his forthcoming films—a special effects sci-fi film Ra.1, Don 2 and the Karan Johar-directed My Name Is Khan where he plays a person afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome (a kind of autism characterised by difficulties in social interaction, limited repetitive patterns of behavior and clumsiness)—as a new experience for him but not necessarily for the viewers. “I’ll be the same Shah Rukh Khan in all my films,” he says.

Is that a dig at all those who accuse him of doing the same stuff in all his films? Declaring that “if they knew what acting was, then they’d be SRK,” he mocks all the words used by critics to describe great acting. “Show me one face that can express words like ‘internalised’, ‘quiet’, ‘underplayed’ or ‘resilient’ and I’ll change my name. The fact is that you can’t express acting, you can only feel it. I don’t have one expression for acting to prove that I’m a great actor. I’ve millions of expressions,” he huffs.
In the space that he’s currently in, it’s the simple aspects of acting that give him a high. “I’m no longer turned on by a 60 ft jump. These days I like the simple details like how my Rab Ne… character, Surinder, washes dishes or eats toast with a big noise.”

... contd.