There was a spontaneous sing-along, shouts of “I love you” and the tinkling of a cowbell brought by an audience member to remind Shah Rukh Khan of the film he made in the Alps long ago: the Indian megastar’s masterclass at the Locarno Film Festival was the closest Switzerland has come to pandemonium. In front of a packed house at Locarno’s venerable Gran Rex cinema, SRK accepted the adoration and declarations of love with the gracious fan-friendliness that has endeared him to the world for 35 years.

Stardom, he insisted, doesn’t really matter. “People can be entertained when they come into contact with me, that’s the most important thing,” he said during an hour-long interview with festival director Giona Nazzaro. “I want them to come away with something entertaining. It can be sad entertainment, it can be good entertainment, it can be romantic entertainment. But I’ve never understood the stardom part of it.”

“I try to give joy. I fall, I do somersaults, I run, I fight, I sing, I romance, I become a villain – I’m like a monkey, I do everything to give you joy. And then, when people get joy, they like me. And that like turns into adulation, because ‘Okay, this is fun, it gives us joy.’ They take a time-out from their life, from their work, sit down for two hours, get happy and respond by saying ‘we love you.’ Stardom is just an accidental, consequential byproduct of that. It has nothing to do with me. Or them. Nothing to do with what I do or what they do. It’s something else.

“I never thought that stardom was important. Yes, I respect it a lot. It has given me a lot of recognition, respect, love, money, my family is happy about it. But apart from that, stardom is not the first thing I carry with me when I walk into a room. I have always said that I wear stardom like a T-shirt, not like a tuxedo. I am careless with it. But if it is not there, will this love disappear? I don’t think so.” The audience screamed as one man. “No!!”.