Posters of the tall and beautiful Anushka wearing with a stern, determined look and sword in hand, even as she exposes a tantalising waist, are all over cinema halls this week, setting our imagination on fire. Hardly any other actor’s name is given away by the production house. An occasional but very vague picture of Arya surfaces but Anushka is the selling factor in this territory. Ever since Arundathi happened, the actor has been a name to reckon with in the movie market.
She is carrying a Rs. 55-crore bilingual film on her shoulders — titled Varna in Telugu and Irandaam Ulagam in Tamil. Anushka Shetty shuttles between one television studio to the other in Chennai and squeezes in time to speak of her role and the last quarter of this year which has given her three big films on a platter — Bahubali, Rudrama Devi and Varna, directed by Rajamouli, Gunasekhar and Selvaraghavan respectively.
All three films belong to the same genre; isn’t it a co-incidence that she got all around the same time? Anushka clarifies, “Varna is the name of the character. Arya’s character is called Maruvan. It is not a period film; it is a romantic fantasy and the Tamil title means ‘A second world’. Rudrama Devi is a historical, Bahubali is not any kind of period movie. Rajamouli is setting his own time frame for it. So they are three totally different genres. Varna talks of a parallel world... not one particular world as such, and about the love over there and how pure it can be for a person who loves to travel. It is a fantasy and I have never done such a love story before. The whole of Varna and Irandaam Ulagam has two distinct characters, i.e., there is a love story between two different characters in two different worlds. One character is innocent, speaks her hear heart out and the other is stronger, rebellious and thinks out of the box.”
Anushka recalls the shooting in Georgia for 90 days and the locations which didn’t have proper accommodation and places where weather condition was bad. “It’s all a part and parcel of movie making. The unit tried its best to make things comfortable for us but after a point there was nothing much anybody could do. We had to speak old Tamil and I was moving between two films, every 15 days.”
Anushka gives credit to her directors for creating such beautiful characters in all her three films and says all the three — Gunashekar, Rajamouli and Selvaraghavan — are extremely passionate about their work. She adds, “All of them have a very clear picture, very good reasoning of what needs to be done. When one has a good designer and a makeup artiste then half the job is done. The rest is all about how much we can absorb and put across what the director says. It is a challenge but he is there to guide us. The credit goes to the directors; it is definitely exciting to be a part of such subjects.”
Actors her age had never had such a good repertoire except for a few in Mumbai, but Anushka thinks otherwise. “Lot of people came here when they were 14 or 15. I entered films when I was 25. I am happy that I am getting good roles now. It has never been a cakewalk for me. A lot of effort goes into my work and I tremble on the first day of the shoot. After the shot I look at the director waiting for his approval,” smiles Anushka.
