(May 17, 2026) Karan Brar is the Punjabi-American actor who grew up watching his face become familiar to millions of children across the world. Best known as Ravi Ross on Disney Channel’s hit series Jessie and its spin-off Bunk’d, he was, for much of his teens, one of the most recognisable Indian-origin faces on American television. But behind the success and visibility, Karan was struggling to reconcile public expectations with private reality. Having spoken openly about grief, identity and mental health, now he has entered a more grounded phase of his life and career, taking on more personal work on stage while rebuilding himself beyond the Disney image.
From a Seattle suburb to Hollywood
Karan Brar was born in Redmond, Washington, a city in the Seattle metropolitan region best known as the home of Microsoft. He grew up in nearby Bothell, a largely residential suburb where many Indian immigrant families settled over the years because of the technology industry nearby. Hollywood careers rarely begin there.
Karan attended Cedar Wood Elementary School and showed an early interest in performance. His parents enrolled him in acting classes at the John Robert Powers and Patti Kalles studios, two respected training schools for young actors.
That decision changed the course of his life. In 2010, at the age of 11, Karan landed the role of Chirag Gupta in the Hollywood comedy Diary of a Wimpy Kid. One detail stood out immediately. Despite playing an Indian character, Karan naturally spoke with an American accent and worked with a dialect coach for the role. He later reprised the character in the sequels Rodrick Rules and Dog Days.
A year later came the breakthrough that made him globally recognisable. In 2011, Disney Channel cast Karan as Ravi Ross in Jessie, a young boy adopted from India into a wealthy New York family. The character had originally been written differently, but casting directors reworked the role after Karan’s audition. Ravi Ross would go on to become one of the most visible Indian-origin characters on American children’s television during the decade.
Karan Brar with co-actors on a Disney show
Karan remained with Jessie until 2015 before continuing the role in the spin-off series Bunk’d. By the end of his teenage years, he had become a familiar face not just in the United States, but across the wider Indian diaspora that grew up watching Disney Channel.
The private conflict behind the Disney image
While his public profile grew, Karan was privately struggling with questions of identity, belonging and self-acceptance.
In a deeply personal 2023 essay for Teen Vogue titled Karan Brar: How I Found Myself, Karan described feeling split between the version of himself the public knew and the person he was privately becoming.
“There was public Karan and private Karan,” he wrote. “Both were real, but trying to hold them in one body was proving to be too much.”
The pressure came from multiple directions. As the child of Indian immigrants, Karan often felt caught between cultural expectations at home and the realities of growing up in Hollywood. Moving out of his family home created emotional distance at a time when he was already struggling internally.
“The way my mom and dad were raised, kids don’t move out until they’re married and ready to start a life of their own,” he wrote about his parents’ reaction to him leaving home.
“My younger self was desperate to be the perfect kid who did what was expected of him, while bringing honor to the family name.” In 2019, Karan moved into a Los Angeles home with fellow Disney alumni Cameron Boyce and Sophie Reynolds, where he also opened up to them about his bisexuality.
“This was the first time in years that I wasn’t hiding anything from them; instead, they were seeing the most authentic version of me,” he wrote. For the first time in years, he no longer felt divided between two versions of himself.
Grief, depression and seeking treatment
Later in 2019, Cameron Boyce died unexpectedly at the age of twenty from complications related to epilepsy. The loss devastated Karan, who had only recently opened up to one of his closest friends about his identity.
In the Teen Vogue essay, Karan wrote that Boyce’s death intensified an already fragile emotional state. “Cameron died in 2019, shortly after we moved in together,” he wrote. “His death threw my already-fragile sense of self into a tailspin.”
Grief collided with unresolved shame, career uncertainty and increasingly unhealthy alcohol use during the pandemic years. “Almost every night was spent getting drunk by myself in order to cope,” he wrote.
By 2020, Karan’s mental health had significantly deteriorated. “Things reached a tipping point when a severe breakdown forced me to confront the current state of my life.” Karan eventually admitted himself into an inpatient treatment centre in the United States, where he was diagnosed with PTSD and Major Depressive Disorder.
View this post on Instagram
Rebuilding life on his own terms
Over the following years, therapy, medication and close friendships gradually helped Karan regain stability. He has spoken openly about his depression going into remission and about learning to live more honestly with himself.
“The gap between who I am and who I appear to be is shrinking,” he wrote in the essay. “It’s not closed yet, and it may never be.”
When he published his Teen Vogue essay in 2023, thousands of readers particularly young South Asians connected with his experience of balancing identity, family expectations and public perception.
His work has also taken a more personal direction. In 2024, Karan appeared in the play Data at Arena Stage in Washington D.C., portraying Maneesh, a queer son of Indian immigrants navigating identity and belonging. The role closely mirrored many of the themes Karan had begun discussing publicly in his own life.
The production later transferred to New York’s Lucille Lortel Theatre in 2026, one of Off-Broadway’s most established venues.
In April 2025, Emory University in Atlanta invited Karan to deliver the keynote address at its Class Day Crossover ceremony. Organisers described him as someone whose story resonated with young people navigating uncertainty and self-definition.
View this post on Instagram
That, ultimately, is what makes Karan Brar’s story resonate beyond Disney Channel fame. It is not simply the story of a successful child actor. It is the story of someone who spent years trying to separate public acceptance from private truth, endured personal loss at a formative age, sought help when his life began to unravel, and gradually learned how to live more fully as himself.
- Follow Karan Brar on Instagram
