M-Town still loves her for her portrayal of bold-and-beautiful home nurse Anjali with shades of grey in the 2011 Anoop Menon-Jayasurya starrer ‘Beautiful’. And, after an interlude, the sensuous Meghana Raj is back to Mollywood in debutant Sudhi Anna’s ‘Hallelujah’ which will start rolling in May. Meghana will be seen playing the lead lady opposite Narain. “’Hallelujah’ is a family entertainer which narrates the story of a long lost relationship,” says Meghana.
She says: “Though the name of character has not yet been decided, I will be playing an extremely sweet and good-mannered innocent girl. She is not gullible but a soft-hearted person who sees the good side of everything. Narain’s character, who has spent his childhood in the village, returns after a gap of 20 years. There is a past that connects us both and there forms a journey of the two towards a future.”
Though the movie’s title is a biblical one, the actor clarifies the subject is not in any way religious. “We say ‘Hallelujah’ when something good happens and during celebrations. So, the title resembles a mood of joy and the hope for everything to turn out good,” adds the actor who has acted in all the South Indian languages.
Meghana, who is fluent in both Tamil and Kannada, feels Malayalam is not a tough language. “I never set any benchmarks for myself and have always liked to experiment with every language film. I felt Malayalam as a mix of Tamil and Kannada. For me, the language is interesting not difficult,” says Meghana who has done around 19 Malayalam films in her six-year-long career.
Ask her how she cops when her movies doesn’t do well in the box office, she says: “Even after putting a lot of hard work, if people do not like it, we feel an emotional stress and I do feel disappointed but they are also the reasons that make me feel to better myself.”
Born to well-known Kannada actors Sunder Raj and Pramila Joshai, Meghana follows her parents advice. “They have always told me that it doesn’t matter if your films doesn’t do good, the point is if you are consistently working hard, then some day you will get its result,” says Meghana.
And as her parents thoughts, it seems 2015 is a busy year for the Bangalore girl. With five Kannada projects in her kittym after ‘Hallelujah’ she will be shooting for two Kannada projects back-to-back. “I will be shooting for ‘Vamshodaraka’ and ‘Aatagara’ after wrapping up here. In ‘Vamshodaraka’, I play the daughter of a landlord who completes her study from college and returns back to her village to do something good for her people.
While in ‘Aatagara’, which is a story on par with Hollywood projects, I play a super model who gets stranded in an island along with nine others,” says Meghana. Another films in the pipeline are kannada projects ‘Allama’ and ‘Bhujanga’.