QUEEN’S ROAD:On his way back from Delhi, Sanchari Vijay tells City Express how his passion for theatre has kept him up at night.
The artiste, who was recently honoured with the National Award for Best Actor, says he took up the role in the film Nanu Avanalla Avalu at the insistence of friends.
“I wasn’t keen, but a few friends told me that the film would go national. After I read the book and the script, I was convinced,” he told City Express over the phone, as he travelled back to Bengaluru after the awards ceremony.
Working in the film brought him in close touch with the transgender community, and he hopes he can continue to encourage films that bring out the problems they face. “So people can understand better, the way I did,” he said.
Recently, he was at the muhurat of Pumstri, a film that will feature transgender people in lead roles. He has been offered Kannada, Hindi, Tamil and Malayalam films, all of them commercial. “But it might be a while before I take up roles like these (the characters he played in Nanu Avanalla Avalu and the artsy Harivu),” he said.
In Delhi, apart from Kangana Ranaut and Dhanush — and L K Advani, whom he was excited to meet — he says he was approached by a quite a few Bengali and Marathi directors. “Even an Assamese one. We’ve exchanged numbers, and they’ve said that we’ll work together,” he said.
What touched him the most, however, was one of the jury members saying he was waiting to meet Vijay. “He’s 86. I should have been the one who waited to meet him,” he said.
As someone who struggled to make his passion for acting work, he wants to help rural youth achieve their dreams.
“When I was a kid, after watching a movie, I would come out of the theatre and act like the hero. I always wanted to act,” he said.
However, ‘pressures at home’ and the family’s financial circumstances didn’t let him get close enough to his dream until he came to Bengaluru to pursue a degree in engineering.
The village boy who became a movie hero
“I had an inferiority complex because I was from a rural background and hardly ever mingled with anyone,” he said. But the arts held an attraction and he braced himself to sing for the college fest in his final year.
“They told me I was to sing Mujhko pehchaanlo from Don 2.” He hums the tune again.
“I went on to the stage, started singing and realised that it was not a solo but a group song. I was one among 30!” he said, with a hearty laugh.
But the experience convinced him that he should become more culturally active, and a roommate of his, noticing his ability to mimic, introduced him to take up theatre. All his initial roles were sans dialogue, he recalls.
But as he worked with varied troupes, from Darpana and Adamya to Sanchari, his hobby took off as a career, though he also straddled a job as a student welfare officer at a college that brought him in touch with the bigwigs of the Kannada film industry. “That’s how I met Rangayana Raghu, Jogi Prem, Ramesh Aravind, and through a mutual friend, Prakash Rai,” he said.
But when he didn’t have a job, his friends helped him get through the month. “Theatre is my passion. But it’s also what created fear and kept me up at night each time I was penniless,” he said.
He’s aware that a successful film career might mean that he has less time for theatre. “But I hope to balance the two out,” he says.
And if he can’t act or direct for the stage as much as he once could, the unassuming artiste is sure he will continue to be a spectator or volunteer.