After wooing the audience with his melodic voice, Host-musician-actor Sreerama Chandra is all set to win hearts with his acting stints in Papum Pasivadu. The adept artist, who is exuberant for the show, gets candid with The Pioneer about the same, and trying his luck now on the acting front too.
Tejal Sinha
Ending the month of September with a coming-of-age tale, Aha brings its new major release Papum Pasivadu, which is available on the platform from today. The weekly episodic web show is headlined by actor, host, and musician Sreerama Chandra. Meanwhile, Rashi Singh, Sri Vidya Maharshi, Gayatri Chaganti, Madee, and Ashok Kumar are the other actors in the show produced by Akhilesh Vardhan for the show. In fact, recently, Amitabh Bachchan shared the teaser on his Instagram and Twitter accounts, adding to the anticipation surrounding this promising series.
The show already making the right noise even before its premiere, marks Chandra’s debut as a lead. If you’ve watched the trailer, it already gives you a hint about how the show revolves around the highs and lows in the life of a confused youngster, probably in his 20s. He falls in love with not one but three women and lands in trouble while struggling to find his true soulmate. He faces the wrath of cops, meets a godman, gets rejected by women, and is quite unprepared for what life throws at him. The star who has recently enraptured hearts with his recent song O Rendu Prema Meghaalila from Baby, is super excited for Papum Pasivadu.
In an exclusive chat with The Pioneer, the thrilled Balma singer shares, “I’m very happy, and for a change, I’m playing a lead in Papum Pasivadu. It’s all about a late 20-year-old guy and his crisis of finding a girl and confused about which girl to select and who would be right for him. It’s more of a real-life story, probably. It’s a boy-next-door story and every person at some point in time has this confusion in their life that Kranthi has. Kranthi is my character so everybody will be able to relate to this at some point. The entire series centres around this guy’s confusion in life, how he deals with it, and the three distinct woman who are in three different situations.”
Once that the audience sees the show, the Atu Itu Ooguthu singer is very confident about feeling related to the character and the story. “This story is about someone like me and you; a common man where having a partner or falling in love is everybody’s part of life. In the show, you’d get to see how when you like someone, they don’t like you or vise versa, or having some toxic relationship or one of the partners will not let you go from the relationship. These situations are something that people will definitely relate to and being from a lower middle-class family having a family where mom is saying yes and dad is saying no. All these situations brings Papum Pasivadu.”
A much-realistic story indeed! Papum Pasivadu marks his second collaboration with the streaming platform after Indian Idol season 1 in 2022. During those days of the show, he recalls, “I used to play a different skit every episode back then and really enjoyed doing that. They surprisingly saw the actor in me and thought I would fit really well for this character and that, I was doing a good job in acting. It was that when they approached me, I heard the story and I could really relate to it and it went well. I could feel it and I thought why not.”
And thus he ended up doing various workshops and took up learning it in some classes. He’s one of those artists who justifies his work, no matter what it is; hosting, singing, and now we are sure acting as well. Initially, for the unversed, he made his Telugu debut in acting with the Nagarjuna starrer Jagadguru Adi Shankara and then went on to star in films like Prema geema Jantha nai, and MMOF. But now, it seems like just as he shares with us how emerging as the winner of Indian Idol Hindi was the beginning of his musical career, Papum Pasivadu is going to bring a twist to his acting career. Well, something he is looking forward to, and we hope the same. But has acting always been in his list? He enthuses, “I love life in a way where it’s full of surprises and gives you the best that it can when you start investing. It’s like an investment. When you start investing in life, it gives you an amazing return at some point in time. It could be a short-term or long-term return that I’ve experienced with my career in singing that I began in 2010 in Indian Idol. There was a lot of hard work put in during those years and then it started paying off in 2011. After that, I had done some amazing songs in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada. Down the lane in 2022-2021 is when I was on Bigg Boss and those efforts started paying off in 2022 in the form of anchoring and more opportunities in Telugu, redefining me as a person and a singer. I hope now my efforts would start paying off in acting soon.”
The Anaganaganaga singer really hopes for people to watch the show, since he shares that as an actor he has put in a lot of efforts for Papum Pasivadu.
Ending the chitter-chatter on a brighter note, he feels that once people watch him in the show, he is positive about getting more opportunities, be it in films or web series. “Every one at some point has a start. It’s not easy to suddenly pick someone and give them a movie or something. I am glad that Aha has seen that in me, understood me, learnt and have appreciated the actor in me. I have put in my heart, soul and a lot of hard work into it. I would definitely want people to watch it and let me know how they feel about it. After this, I would definitely want to get more opportunities in acting as well.”
