As Keerthy Suresh keeps us waiting in the lobby of producer RD Raja’s studio office, I’m duly informed that she was out shooting at Binny Mills for Bairavaa , Vijay’s 60th film. In a TV interview earlier, I remembered her mentioning she was still in school when she saw Vijay in flesh and blood for the first time.
When she’s finally ready, there is still a visible inertia of fatigue on her face. She prefers to keep her voice very low; people sitting just a seat away would have to strain to get every word. I remind her about the Vijay darshan in Kerala, in an attempt to ask her what she can reveal about Bairavaa . She is tight-lipped. “Nothing!” she says. “Except that I cannot bring myself to believe that he’s now a colleague. I’m still in fangirl mode next to him.”
Keerthy Suresh is just four films old in Kollywood. Her fourth film, Remo , has just released. And she does admit she’s nervous about it. “There are huge expectations and we have to meet them,” she says.
Her last film with Dhanush, Thodari , received a less-than-lukewarm reception among viewers and critics. But she insists there’s nothing she could’ve really done about it. “We tried our best; maybe there are some things that were left lagging. But I’m very happy with the kind of role I got; it was something that was very close to my heart.” She played a Malayali girl who can speak bits of Tamil.
Keerthy insists that it wasn’t easy to pull off, because she had to bring in certain nuances of a girl trying hard to speak another language while dubbing.
Getting back to Remo , it happens to be her second stint with Sivakarthikeyan on film (the first being Rajini Murugan). Was he a key factor in her deciding to take up the project? “Could be, because I’ve been seeing on social media that our chemistry is good, that people look forward to seeing us together on screen… and this played a huge part in Remo. So, fingers crossed, if this film does well, then my answer is yes!” Keerthy, however, is quite confident that her character of a young doctor would connect better with most girls than the one she played in Thodari .
When it comes to choosing scripts, Keerthy says she looks at four key things: “The team, the story, my character, and then, my screen space.” Earlier, when she was a student, her mother played the role of decision-maker when it came to offers. “Now, she asks me not to reveal anything, so she can be surprised when she sees me on screen.”
