If there’s one thing R Raja hates in Tamil films, it’s the way the American mappillai has been portrayed. “Think of it,” asks the screenwriter over the phone from the US, “Every Tamil film portrays the ‘American return’ in similar fashion — clean shaven, well educated and with a great dressing sense. But he still doesn’t get the girl.”
So, when he started writing something that would “give a positive twist to this character”, Raja ensured that he’d do a few things. Like making him the lead and not the usual peripheral character. Like not naming him Karthik. “Once I started breaking away from the stereotypes I’d seen on screen, I thought: why not make him gay?”
That singular thought led him to the one-liner of his début web-series that is up online as part of Zee5 Originals. That line — what if a youngster not ready for marriage lies that he is gay — led to everything else.
“A gay America mappillai offered a lot of possibilities,” he says, “It gave me a chance to explore his family angle and the homophobia in society. Since I was making this for an OTT platform, I knew that audiences would be more receptive to such a subject.”
While the cast features a lot of youngsters, including Arjun Chidambaram, it also has seniors Kitty and Leela Samson in vital roles. “They loved the script and readily accepted. They were quite happy that these kind of stories were being made,” he reveals.
Raja worked on the script of the eight-episode America Mappillai for a couple of months, fine-tuning the multiple drafts that he had worked on. After that, he needed someone to direct it. “I interviewed a few people to direct it, but our sensibilities didn’t match.” That was before Praveen Padmanabhan, a photographer who’s done music videos, came into the picture.
Now that he’s content that he’s given the America mappillai a good image, Raja is moving on... to destroy another stereotype. “I’m working on the loosu ponnu stereotype next,” he laughs, “It might not be a web-series, but rather a one-off sketch. I’m looking forward to getting that out soon.”
