Every actor goes through the Friday blues before their movie release. During promotions though, they project confidence and contentment. Ahead of the release of Gang Leader, Nani is his usual jovial self and says he abhors taking a break from shoot before he starts his next. This is also one reason why he has been moving from one film to the other for the past few years and also taking care of his production house that kept him busy. As soon as Gang Leader releases, he’s quickly moving to the sets of Indraganti Mohan Krishna’s V.
At the media interaction, he says he’s glad to have been asked a question on Jersey not making enough money at the box office. He elaborates, “For a film like Jersey which has a 36- year-old cricketer, who’s a loser, lacks physical fitness and has issues in dealing with his wife and son that all becomes a part of a tragic climax, has broken every stereotype in Telugu cinema and has collected 30 crore at the theatres. How can you say it collected less? When Middle Class Abbayi minted money, people questioned me if I will ever do a good, content oriented script and now when I do Jersey, people remark it didn’t beat MCA at the BO. Jersey is being remade in multiple languages and I’m looking ahead for a release in China and at the domestic level, made profits. There’s no reason for complain.”
Jersey was intense and he’d feel ‘heavy’ everyday going back home after the shoot, say Nani. On the other hand Gang Leader was like playing around. Be it laughter or melodrama, any emotion requires the same effort. If an actor does it genuinely, people will believe it and like it, he says as a matter of fact.
Isn’t it alarming that his name has been added as a prefix to the title? Doesn’t it mean he is taking away the credit of the director by calling it ‘Nani’s Gang Leader’ instead of ‘Nani...Gang Leader’ like ‘Kalyan Ram Katti’? He dismisses it as a mere cosmetic change and says that one shouldn’t be reading too much into it. “Except for the title confusion, there is no issue. It is a Vikram K Kumar’s cinema. When the title comes for discussion, we didn’t want to have any dispute so it was the production’s call,” he adds.
He recalls the day when he was practising cricket for Jersey, director Vikram K Kumar waited patiently to share the title with him and asked his opinion. Comparisons are uncalled for as Gang Leader belongs to a different genre. Nani warns, “Don’t expect too much romance here, this isn’t a love story. There is a nice, emotional angle and the story is very entertaining and least complicated. It is a very simple story, even if there are twists and turns, it’s still fun. Nani goes to elaborate his character, Pencil Parthasarathy — he writes books and believes he is world famous. He watches all English films, and writes books ‘inspired’ by them. He now wants his 29th novel to be original. As the process of his revenge begins, his writing too takes off in a parallel manner. His friend and publisher knows his so called talent. Revenge is an intense emotion but here it is dealt in a light hearted manner by four women and a child.”
He adds that all the characters belong to different age groups, each one with a different characteristic trait. Their background is different, their reason for revenge too is different. Nani deals with them at their individual level and the villain (Karthikeya Gummakonda) at his level. He reveals Vikram’s narration is entertaining, his hilarious dialogues come to the fore. He recalls, “I laughed a lot, you will do in the theatres too. There has been no film so far that tapped his comic angle of Vikram. Vikram said he didn’t know there is so much fun in doing films without a break like me, Gang Leader was an eye opener.”
Karthikeya Gummakonda’s inclusion in the team happened without a fuss, says Nani who recalls with a smile the time when Karthikeya spoke to him non stop for 15 minutes when he was offered the role. There were other actors who were being considered for the role, but Karthikeya never gave them a chance as he was approached first and was more than excited to take it up.
On Aniruddh, Nani says he was taken for the energy he infuses in his songs. “For Jersey, we did debate a bit but repeating him for Gang Leader, there was no discussion. We didn’t need big jokes from Saranya or Lakshmi — one glance and one word was enough to get what was required.”