Majidi to Pa. Ranjith

How many actors can claim they were discovered by Mammootty? Malavika Mohanan can. Accompanying her father, cinematographer KU Mohanan, to an ad shoot with Malayalam legend Mammootty, she was asked if she would debut opposite his son, Dulquer Salmaan. She said yes. The result was the Malayalam movie Pattam Pole in 2013. Since then, Malavika has been directed by the Iranian great Majid Majidi, in Beyond the Clouds in 2017; by Karthik Subbaraj in Petta in 2019; and most recently by Pa. Ranjith in Thangalaan. The last was perhaps the most intense film of her career, where she found what her body was capable of. She pushed herself to acquire the physicality needed for a panther-esque antagonist, complete with feral make up and stick fighting skills borrowed from the ancient Tamil martial art of Silambam. “I ended up hurting Vikram (her co-star) several times while practising but he was such a gentleman,” Malavika says. On working with Pa. Ranjith, she says she likes people standing up for what they believe in, who walk their talk. Malavika will now be seen in April 2025 opposite Prabhas in a horror comedy, The Raja Saab. She has 4.2 million followers on Instagram and is cognizant of the balance she has to maintain between the red carpet and big screen. “How you are getting offers from any industry is down to how popular you are on social media,” says Malavika. “It’s about the PR game, that’s the nature of the entertainment beast. Everybody wants a part of you,” she adds. At the same, Malavika says, there is no one rule that fits all, so it is about what one is comfortable doing.

Nagpur to Kochi

Saiju Kurup spent most of his childhood and youth in Nagpur and can speak fluent Hindi. A mining engineer, he stumbled into acting and initially thought it would benefit him in his sales career with ICICI Bank. He started acting with a lead role in Mayookham in 2005, but it was only with Trivandrum Lodge in 2012, that he could say he became an actor. “I got a good director and he extracted a good performance from me,” says the actor who insists he never prepares for any role. Kurup has worked in 150 films, as a villain, a leading man, and a comedian with an incredibly light touch. A Shah Rukh Khan fan, he says he never missed a single film starring his favourite actor. He does not think Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal was a toxic film just as Baazigar and Darr were not. “In Baazigar, Shah Rukh Khan throws Shilpa Shetty off the roof. In Darr, he torments Juhi Chawla on the phone, and he stalks her. We still love Shah Rukh,” says Kurup. Jai Mahendran, SonyLIV’s first Malayalam original series, and Kurup’s first web series, is a clever comment on corruption with Kurup playing a character who manages to do wrong but with a charming smile. Kurup says he only discovered the complete arc of his character once he sat down to read the script one day during the shoot. “I read Malayalam slowly but when I finished the script I was blown away by it,” he adds.

Rewind

Most of us believe Sharmila Tagore was the first Hindi film heroine to wear a swimsuit on screen in 1967 in An Evening in Paris. What else would she wear while she was water skiing begs the question. But coyness and economical display of body are two characteristics of Hindi film stars. But there are some before Tagore who wore the swimsuit — the first in Hindi cinema being Nalini Jaywant in Gyan Mukherjee’s Sangram with Ashok Kumar in 1950. In a picnic scene, the hero and heroine go boating before stripping down to their bathing suits to fool around in a lake. Nargis then famously wore a swimsuit in Awaara a year later. She is teaching Raj Kapoor how to swim, and when she tells him he will drown as the water is deep, he utters the iconic dialogue: “Hum toh dooben hai sanam, tum ko bhi le doobenge” (I am drowning but I will take you with me). In the film Dilli ka Thug in 1958, Nalini Jaywant’s niece Nutan took part in what was perhaps the first sequence of synchronised swimming in Bollywood. Nutan, clad in a glittering body suit, was seated in a gigantic lotus, with an umbrella in the middle of the lake with Kishore Kumar looking on, in a fake beard and a sherwani (do not ask). Not that swimsuits now are used in any more logical fashion. Just that they show a lot more skin.

BollywoodcinemaMalavika MohananSaiju KurupSharmila Tagore