Fenil and Bollywood

The first is always special, but you can never really get used to winning a National Award,” says Prakash Raj, who won his fourth National Award; this year being in the best actor category for Priyadarshan’s Tamil film Kanchivaram. He had earlier won the National Award for best supporting actor in Iruvar. In Kanchivaram Raj enacts the role of a silk weaver named Vengadan; the film depicts the lives of silk weavers in pre-Independence India.

Raj is one of the best loved villains in the South, although the role that has fetched him the award is distinct from the roles that have fetched him the fans. Was there a special preparation for the role? “I pretty much go empty handed when I walk into a film. I may be enacting the role of a Communist in a certain generation, with no idea about the constraints in the country at the time. Just as in Iruvar I had to understand the Dravidian culture to go into the depths of the personality of the protagonist. You need to unlearn much when you break away from a particular genre. And your reward is what you take away as the residue, which feeds your work in commercial cinema only to make it more nuanced,” says the actor. Through his run as the mainstream villain he was exposed to a school of acting that emphasised on loudness – pitched decibel levels, protruding eyes, all the trappings of a villain down south. But an opportunity to play certain off-beat roles freed him from the familiar trappings. “It is a human task to come out of it, and eventually your reflexes become used to it.”

It also has ramifications on the personal front. “My house in Bangalore is 35 kilometers from the airport, and whenever I’ve had to catch a flight in the past, I have sped through at over 150; now I feel driving at a 100 is also fine. So your life acquires a balance as well,” he says. “The comfort of the so-called intense actor falls by the wayside very easily eventually. And surely, it expresses in your own life too. It wasn’t hard therefore to move from the robustness of villain to an understated performance, as in Kanchivaram.”

Mumbaikars’ newest exposure to Prakash Raj’s brand of villainy has been in the film Wanted. “My approach to any role is touched with wit. It is almost as if I acquire my  own identity that way. And indeed, I stand out because of this approach, as was evident in Wanted,” he says. “Apart from this, Prabhu Deva’s direction takes you up by a few notches; he choreographs his films.”

Kanchivaram

The actor has now donned the mantle of a director in a Kannada film, yet untitled, based on the relationship of a father and a daughter. “I found myself thinking once that ten years down the line if my daughter, who is 13 now, calls me from Miami to say that she is set to marry someone from a completely unfamiliar race, would I be able to accept it? It’s a film about the fact that daughters grow up but fathers don’t,” he says. “When music leaves a flute does the flute have any hold over the music? Give them wings and let them fly. In the film, the protagonist’s daughter falls in love with a young Sikh, which leads to conflict given the contrasts of the north and south cultures. “My daughter already knows that it is ‘our’ film and when I speak to her casually about it, she has valuable inputs to offer.”

Back in the day the actor used to be known as a confirmed family man, but since his divorce from wife Lalitha Kumari recently, he has been branded quite the ladies man. “It’s nice to be a wonderful guy,” he laughs out aloud. “I am nice to women and they call me a womaniser.”