Pulkit Samrat Transformation for Glory: The Real Story Behind His Netflix OTT Debut as a Boxer

In February 2025, at Netflix India’s annual content slate event, Pulkit Samrat walked on stage alongside Divyenndu Sharma and Karan Anshuman to announce Glory. The teaser shown to the audience that day — grainy, intense, set in the smoke-grey world of Indian competitive boxing — barely resembled anything Pulkit had done before. No charm offensive. No comic timing. Just a jaw, a cut eye, and the look of a man who has accepted that he is going to get hit.

For a lot of people in the room, the first reaction was: wait, this is Pulkit Samrat?

That reaction — that double-take — is exactly what the Pulkit Samrat transformation for Glory was designed to produce. This is his first-ever OTT web series as a lead actor. It’s on Netflix. It’s created by Karan Anshuman, the man who built Inside Edge and co-created Mirzapur. And it requires him to be entirely convincing as a boxer — not a romanticised, movie-star boxer with perfect form and clean skin, but a real one, with the weight of a fractured family and an Olympic dream sitting on his shoulders.

By his own account, this is the role Pulkit Samrat has been waiting years to play. He called it, simply: “a dream character.” Understanding why that description carries such weight requires knowing where he came from, what he’s been through, and what this transformation actually involved.

Glory — Full Series Profile

What Is Glory About? The Full Plot Explained

At its centre, Glory is a murder mystery set within the high-pressure world of Indian competitive boxing. Netflix’s own official logline captures it in five punchy sentences: “A brutal attack shatters a family. Raghubir Singh, a legendary boxing coach, is forced to reunite with his estranged sons, Dev and Ravi. Old grudges flare. Blood demands blood. While the ring waits, Olympic glory teeters on the edge. Vengeance has a cost — and secrets won’t stay buried.”

Raghubir Singh (Suvinder Vicky) is one of the finest boxing coaches India has ever produced. His two sons — Dev (Divyenndu) and Ravi (Pulkit Samrat) — are both boxers, but their relationship with their father has been estranged for reasons the series slowly unpacks. When a brutal and violent event forces the three of them back into each other’s orbit, old wounds reopen. The atmosphere is not one of reunion and healing. It’s one of barely suppressed rage, competing ambitions, buried secrets, and the specific kind of violence that only happens between people who know exactly where the other person’s soft spots are.

Layered over this family drama is the concrete, tick-tocking pressure of Olympic qualification. The road to the Olympics runs directly through these three men and their fractured relationship. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past. The competition doesn’t wait for reconciliation. And somewhere in the middle of all of it is a murder — a crime that implicates everyone and exonerates no one.

The producers Mohit Shah and Karan Anshuman described Glory as “a deeply personal project” — not just a murder mystery, but a story about what it costs to chase greatness when the price is paid by your own family. That framing is important: it’s not a sports show that happens to have a crime subplot, or a crime show that happens to be set in a gym. The two are genuinely integrated. The violence outside the ring mirrors the violence inside it.

The Real Transformation — What Pulkit Actually Went Through

The Pulkit Samrat transformation for Glory began long before cameras rolled in Punjab. When the Netflix slate announcement was made in February 2025, Pulkit had already started training. The teaser shown at the event featured footage of his training — not a highlight reel of impressive punches, but the kind of footage that shows the actual process: watching, learning, sweating, getting it wrong, starting over.

On his Instagram, Pulkit posted a clip from a training session that became widely shared. In it, two professional boxers are sparring intensely in the ring. Pulkit is not in the ring. He is sitting in the corner, watching. The caption he wrote: “Learning from them like a good boy.”

That image — the Bollywood actor, the familiar face from Fukrey, sitting at the side of the ring and watching professionals do what professionals do — was more revealing than any muscles-flexing transformation photo could have been. It showed an actor who understood that the first step in playing a boxer convincingly is not to immediately become one. It’s to observe what you don’t yet know.

In His Own Words: Why This Role Means So Much

Pulkit Samrat has been unusually direct about what Glory represents for him personally. At the Netflix India event, he didn’t reach for PR-approved language about being “honoured” and “grateful” in the generic sense. He was specific:

In a later interview with Glamsham, he went further. About the role itself:

And about the shooting experience:

Three things stand out in these statements. First: he specifically called out Karan Anshuman as a key reason for his excitement — not the platform, not the production scale, but the creator. For an actor who has spent much of his career working in films where the creative infrastructure varied widely, having a showrunner with Anshuman’s credentials clearly mattered. Second: the phrase “dream character” is not casual. It signals that Pulkit has been waiting for a role like this for a while — the question was finding the right story and the right context. Third: the word “addictive” in describing the intensity of filming is rare. Actors tend to describe difficult shoots as “challenging” or “rewarding.” Addictive means something else — it means the process itself fed something in him, that the difficulty was the point.

Full Cast Guide: Glory on Netflix

Known primarily as a social media star and TV actress, Glory marks a significant dramatic step in her career. One of the younger cast members in the ensemble.

The Man Behind Glory: Who Is Karan Anshuman?

The reason Pulkit specifically cited Karan Anshuman as central to his excitement about Glory is worth dwelling on. Anshuman is one of the most important figures in the Indian OTT space — not just as a creator, but as a specific kind of storyteller who built the template for what a Netflix India crime thriller should feel like.

The continuity between Inside Edge and Glory is visible and intentional. Both are crime thrillers built inside a specific Indian sport. Both use the sport as a lens through which to examine corruption, ambition, family, and violence. The difference with Glory is that boxing is more personal than cricket — it’s a one-on-one sport, a sport of pure physical confrontation, and the injuries and outcomes are literally inscribed on the body. That specificity gives the family drama in Glory a physical dimension that Inside Edge‘s cricket setting couldn’t provide.

His Co-Stars: Why Divyenndu and Suvinder Vicky Were the Right Choices

Divyenndu Sharma is arguably India’s finest OTT actor right now when it comes to the combination of intensity and unpredictability. His Munna Bhaiya in Mirzapur — impulsive, dangerous, darkly funny, genuinely terrifying in certain moments — became one of the defining performances of the Indian streaming era. In The Railway Men (Netflix, 2023), he demonstrated that the same intensity could be channelled into something quieter and more emotionally devastating. Playing Dev Singh in Glory — a boxer carrying unresolved rage and a broken relationship with his father — is exactly the kind of role that plays to every strength he has.

Suvinder Vicky came to wide national attention with Kohrra (Netflix, 2023), in which he played a conflicted Punjabi police officer navigating a murder investigation and his own fractured family life simultaneously. The parallels with his Glory character are unmistakable — both are older Punjabi men of authority whose past choices have created complicated present realities. But Glory requires something different from Kohrra‘s introspective register: Raghubir Singh is a figure of towering presence, a man whose reputation in the boxing world is immense even as his relationship with his sons has collapsed entirely. Vicky’s ability to hold both sides of that contradiction — the public legend and the private failure — is exactly what the role demands.

For Pulkit, being placed alongside these two specific actors is both an opportunity and a challenge. Divyenndu and Vicky are both established OTT performers with critical credibility. If Pulkit holds his own in scenes with them — and by all accounts of the shoot, he did — the work speaks for itself.

Pulkit Samrat’s Career Arc: From Bittoo Boss to Netflix

Pulkit Samrat’s career follows a pattern that is surprisingly common in Bollywood: a memorable, charming debut, followed by a string of commercial comedies that establish a reliable brand but create a perception ceiling, followed — when the actor is willing to take the risk — by a project that reframes everything that came before it.

He quit an advertising course at the Apeejay Institute of Design in Delhi after five months because a modelling assignment arrived that was too good to pass up. He moved to Mumbai and, after a few years building television presence on Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, landed Bittoo Boss (2012) — a film in which, as the Times of India noted, his styling was “so reminiscent of Ranveer Singh” that he had “little scope to create his own identity.” But he pulled off the role “with sincerity and a natural ease.” That natural ease — that quality of being entirely comfortable in his own skin on camera — is something every review of his work noted, regardless of whether the film worked overall.

Fukrey (2013) gave him that identity. Hunny — the over-confident, scheme-hatching, lovable fool — became one of the decade’s most beloved comedy characters, and the Fukrey franchise (three films across a decade) gave him both a loyal audience and a creative safe harbour. The risk was that the safe harbour became a comfortable trap.

Full Filmography: Every Film, Every Verdict

Taish Was the Pivot — Glory Is the Leap

To understand why Glory is such a significant moment, you need to understand what Taish (2020) did first. Directed by Bejoy Nambiar, Taish was a revenge thriller released simultaneously as a feature film and a six-episode series on ZEE5. Pulkit played Sunny Lalwani — a character caught in the crossfire of a violent family feud, someone whose moral position shifts and complicates across the running time. It was the first review that made critics sit up and say: this is not the Fukrey guy anymore.

The IWM Digital Award nomination for Most Popular Actor in a Digital Film followed. More importantly, the conversation around Pulkit in industry circles changed. The question stopped being “will Fukrey 4 happen?” and started being “what is Pulkit capable of doing when the material is serious?”

Taish answered the question in a limited context — a ZEE5 simultaneous release in 2020, during COVID, in a year when the OTT landscape was chaotic and attention was fractured. Glory is the same question asked in a much clearer context: Netflix, 2025, Karan Anshuman, Divyenndu and Suvinder Vicky as co-stars, the boxing sport as a canvas. There are no excuses available if it doesn’t work. And there are no qualifications necessary if it does.

What Glory Means for Pulkit’s Career — An Honest Assessment

The honest picture of Pulkit Samrat’s career is of someone whose talent has consistently run ahead of the material available to him. He is genuinely charming — Anupama Chopra’s Fukrey review was not wrong. He is a warm, natural screen presence. The problem is that “warm and natural” is not a quality that traditionally attracts the kind of scripts that push actors into new territory.

What Glory represents is the combination of factors that were missing before: the right creator (Anshuman, who writes characters with genuine inner lives), the right platform (Netflix, which gives Indian original content a global audience and institutional credibility), the right physical challenge (boxing, which demands a transformation that is visible and specific and cannot be faked), and the right ensemble (Divyenndu and Vicky, who will push him in every shared scene).

The fact that Rahu Ketu — his January 2026 theatrical comedy with Varun Sharma — was a critical and commercial disappointment (India Today: “struggles to justify its ambitious premise”; Rediff: 1 star) actually makes the timing of Glory more significant, not less. It’s a reminder that the comfortable commercial space is no longer working either. The only way forward is exactly what he’s already doing.

At 42, with a stable personal life (married to Kriti Kharbanda since March 2024), and with the specific combination of Karan Anshuman + Netflix + Divyenndu behind him, this is as well-positioned as Pulkit Samrat has ever been for a career-defining moment. Whether Glory becomes that moment will be determined by audiences and critics after they’ve watched it. But the preparation for it — months of boxing training, the genuine emotional investment, the public acknowledgment that this is a dream role — suggests he has done everything within his power to make it work.

Personal Life: Pulkit, Kriti, and the New Chapter

Pulkit Samrat married actress Kriti Kharbanda on March 15, 2024, in a traditional Hindu ceremony in Manesar, Haryana. The two had met while filming Veerey Ki Wedding in 2018, began dating in 2019, and worked together in three films before getting engaged and then married. It was a long relationship that built itself slowly, out of the public eye wherever possible, and that friends and colleagues consistently described as a genuine partnership rather than an industry arrangement.

Kriti Kharbanda has been, by all accounts, a significant part of Pulkit’s decision to take Glory. She is an actress who has consistently made ambitious choices in her own career — Sahasam Swasaga Sagipo, Super 30, Veerey Ki Wedding, Taish — and whose instincts about good material are, based on the evidence, reliable. The fact that Pulkit is calling this his dream role and that the work itself bears out that level of commitment suggests that the new chapter in his personal life and the new chapter in his professional life are genuinely connected.

FAQs: Pulkit Samrat, Glory & the Transformation

Sources: Bollywood Hungama — Glory Announcement · The Statesman — OTT Debut · GlamSham — “Dream Character” Quote · Netflix Official — Glory · IMDb — Glory · Wikipedia — Pulkit Samrat · Hollywood Reporter — Netflix India 2025 Slate · SantaBanta — Training Details

Emily

Popcorn in hand and a opinion ready — Emily covers movie reviews, box office buzz, and all things cinema at Popcorn Review.