Ever since she won applause in the Telugu industry for her performance in Mahanati (2018), a biopic of yesteryear actor Savitri, Keerthy Suresh has wanted to do a Tamil film that could do for her what Mahanati did for her in Telugu. Penguin, simultaneously shot in Tamil and Telugu, could be that film, she feels. It is set to release on June 19 on Amazon Prime Video. In it, she plays a pregnant woman in search of her missing child. “This is an emotional thriller,” she says. “I am happy to be part of a genre I have not tried before.”
Having mostly worked with established directors, working with debutant Eashvar Karthic might have been challenging. “But it never seemed like I was working with someone new,” she says. “It seemed like he had done a lot of movies. From the way he narrated the script to the way he executed it, it was beautiful. I am not sure if a lot of debutant directors are like that.”
The film deals a lot with motherhood, so it was natural that the first person she called to prepare for the role was her mother, actor Menaka. “But then, I relied mostly on Eashvar’s brief,” she says. “His script was inspired by his wife’s pregnancy. I used to ask him a lot of questions.”
Except for Mahanati, which, as a biopic, required a lot of research, her preparation for roles has been fairly simple. “Before the film begins, I mostly try to crack the look. Moving on to the finer nuances of the character happens only when I go on the set,” she says.
Born to Suresh Kumar, a Malayalam film producer whose movies include Coolie (1983), Charithram (1989) and Vishnulokam (1991), and Menaka Suresh, a prominent south Indian actor of the 1980s, Keerthy and her elder sister Revathy always dreamed of associating with films in some way. They wanted to be like their parents, says Keerthy. School vacations were spent on their father’s film sets, something that she enjoyed a lot. So, when an opportunity came to act in one of his films when she was seven years old, she grabbed it. She was cast in Pilots (2000), followed by Achaneyanenikkishtam (2001) and Kuberan (2002), all produced by her father. “Our family background has influenced us a lot,” she says. “That is the reason why my sister works behind the camera [as a costume designer], and I in front of it.”
She considers it a boon that she grew up in two different states. Born in Thiruvananthapuram, the family moved to Chennai when she was very young, and then moved back when she was in the fourth standard. After completing her schooling, she went to Chennai once again to study fashion designing. Although initially she toyed with the idea of becoming a fashion designer, fate had other plans when filmmaker Priyadarshan, a friend of her father, offered her a role in Geethanjali (2013), alongside Malayalam superstar Mohanlal. She could not be happier to accept the role.
The film, in which she had a double role, did not perform well at the box-office, but her performance was applauded. She took up a more challenging role as a blind girl in Ring Master (2014), which was a hit, followed by many films in Tamil and Telugu. But none of them gave her the recognition that Mahanati did, for which she won a national award.
The award, of course, made a big difference to the way people saw her as an actor. But even before it, she knew that something had changed after Mahanati. “Including Penguin, all the women-centric films that I am doing today are because of Mahanati,” she says. “The film [gave a huge boost] to my career. It opened up a lot of opportunities.”
About Penguin, producer Karthik Subbaraj says: “Eashwar felt that the artiste who performs the lead role would have to be very strong, and so we chose Keerthy. A typical heroine could not have played the protagonist—a pregnant mother who has lost her child.”
That the film is releasing on a digital platform hardly makes a difference to Keerthy. She needed this film as her last two releases in Telugu and Tamil were two years and one-and-a-half years ago respectively. Her Malayalam film, Marakkar: Arabikadalinte Simham, that reunites her with Priyadarshan and Mohanlal, was to hit the theatres on March 26, but got delayed because of the lockdown.
“At this point, a release was very important for me because it has been a while now,” she says. Although she feels that a theatrical release would have been better for a thriller like Penguin, she does not mind the film premiering on a digital platform, as it has the advantage of being released in many countries simultaneously.
Keerthy was initially roped in for Maidaan, a Hindi sports film produced by Boney Kapoor, but because of unavailability of dates, she had to pull out. To make a mark in Bollywood is a cherished dream of most actors, but Keerthy is not actively chasing it. “I want to explore a different language and a different culture,” she says. “It gives you a lot more exposure as a performer. But I will wait for the [right] time.”
—with Lakshmi Subramanian