‘It was tough to get through small Telugu dialogues’

Actress Anikha Surendran is all set to woo the audience once again with her performance in the upcoming film Butta Bomma. In a recent interaction with the Hyderabadi media, the actress shares some interesting insights about the film.

Amartya Smaran

Readers! There’s a misconception that most successful child artists lose direction the moment they reach a certain age. This perception is pretty strong amongst people across the world as there have been innumerable instances of several child stars falling off the bandwagon.

However, this isn’t the case with Anikha Surendran. The actress started her career with Sathyan Anthikad’s Kadha Thudarunnu (2007) as a child actor, and went on to star in several films such as Four Friends, 5 Sundarikal, Yennai Arindhaal, and Naanum Rowdydhaan.

In 2018, she acted in a Telugu short film titled, Maa, which was presented by popular Tamil director Gautam Vasudev Menon and the dialogues were penned by Tharun Bhascker, who rose to fame with his directorial debut Pelli Choopulu. Perhaps her first interaction with the Telugu audience took place through the release of Maa.

Three years after the critical success of Maa, Anikha was approached to play a part in Akkineni Nagarjuna’s niece in The Ghost (2022). Now, she’s all set to make her debut as a heroine with Butta Bomma directed by Shouree Chandrashekhar T Ramesh.

The official remake of the Malayalam superhit social drama titled Kappela (2020), tells the tale of a young woman who falls in love with a charming rickshaw driver over-the-phone. Kaithi fame Arjun Das, who’s also making his T’wood debut will be seen playing an important character in the film. The film is produced by Sithara Entertainments and Fortune Four Cinemas banner.

Interacting with the local media, Anikha shares how blessed she feels for having completed a decade in films. She says, “Almost a decade! Not everyone has the same opportunity and I’m also really grateful to have gotten the opportunity to work with different actors across various languages.”

Just like her co-actor Arjun Das, even the enchanting actress initially had some trouble delivering the dialogues in the Telugu language. While Arjun pushed the envelope and dubbed for himself to resonate with the audience, Anikha took a backseat this time as the makers didn’t want to leave no stones unturned.

In a film, nothing is shot according to a sequence. The director might choose to shoot the climax first and then go that one monologue in the opening sequence and switch back to a short one word dialogue scene. Of course, it is chaotic. It takes a lot of time to set up the lights and cameras for a scene. And what do the actors get to do during that time? Wait! Wait! Wait!

If it’s a monologue, then they’re safe. They have enough time and space to prepare, but do you really think an actor would perfectly deliver something like, “Hey! Ramesh, I like you.” Well! The line might look simple, but after four hours of waiting, it is highly possible that an actor might end up saying, “Hey! Ramesh, I la..ik you”. Quite often, the majority of the actors struggle to deliver the smallest of the dialogues.

When The Pioneer asked her if our analogy was true, the Butta Bomma actress couldn’t agree more. “That’s actually a very good point. Since I had to learn a completely different language for this, I took so much time to study the monologues that I had to say and delivered them to perfection.

And there were these small lines which I just couldn’t get through(haha) because I would think, ‘It’s a small dialogue and I can do it on the spot’, but just wouldn’t be able to get through. For me, monologues are a little bit easier because you get your own time and space. Small dialogues do get me. Especially in Telugu,” concurs Anikha.

Another major challenge for actors in films is the problem of continuity. When an actor moves from one scene to the other, he/she should be able to sustain the same emotion. It becomes even more difficult when one has to achieve emotional continuity in an alien language.

“In Telugu, most of the time I had no idea what I was saying,” quips The Ghost actress adding, “I’d take in the scene as it is and emote it accordingly.I would know the meaning of the entire sentence but not each and every word. Our director Ramesh Sir is so incredible and he knows what needs to be done in a scene. So, we worked it out and talked about the scene a lot before we shot anything. That really helped me carry the emotional continuity.”

The Viswasam actress told the media that she learnt many great lessons from director Ramesh while shooting for the film. She went on to say that he’d meticulously direct each and every sequence with perfect planning. When she’d be using her hands too much or whenever she’d give a full dentured smile, he’d ask her to tone it down.

And Malayalam films are known for their fly on the wall approach to making films. We wondered if that kind of strict direction made her feel  suffocated at any point, “I liked being given specific directions and in the beginning it was a little hard to get used to it but once I got habituated to that, I remember going back to a Malayalam film and they were like do whatever you want. I guess it’s different how each director works and even with Ramesh sir  it’s the same and I really enjoyed working with him,” explains the budding star.

Butta Bomma is going to be released this Republic Day  and the beautiful young actress would also be making her Malayalam Debut as a heroine with Oh My Darling.She’s currently working on a Tamil project with HipHop Adhi and is considering saying a yes to some quality Telugu projects.