For an actor who spent years trying to move closer to the camera, DC has proved a significant turning point. Pranav Teophine, who plays Sebastian in Arun Matheswaran's romantic action drama, had already drawn attention for his portrayal of Thami in last year's Narivetta. But the success of DC, headlined by filmmaker Lokesh Kanagaraj in his impressive acting debut, has brought the Malayali actor a different kind of visibility, particularly in Kerala.
From Narivetta to DC
The opportunity arrived after months of uncertainty. "I struggled for three or four months to get another project, wondering why, despite all that appreciation, I wasn't getting opportunities," Pranav recalls of the period after Narivetta. He had been following Arun online for a while, tagging the director in his concept photoshoots, and eventually sent across his profile and work. "He told me he had seen it and thought I had done a good job. He messaged me saying, 'Let us work together as soon as possible.' A week or two later, I got a call from the production team about a subject called DC and was asked to come in for an audition," he says.
Reuniting with Lokesh Kanagaraj
He learnt he would be sharing the screen with Lokesh only once he arrived for the audition. The reunion carried its own weight. Lokesh had given Pranav his breaks in Master and Vikram, with the latter's interval sequence becoming an important early milestone for him, but their paths hadn't crossed since. "I was particularly happy to work with Lokesh sir again since he is my mentor," he says.
Watching his mentor step in front of the camera was its own curiosity. "I had never heard him express interest in acting, and he is quite shy by nature, so I wondered how he would handle leading such a big film, especially with all the negative trolling directed at him at the time," Pranav says. What worked in Lokesh's favour, Pranav believes, was the fact that he was a filmmaker himself. “The crew understood and supported him more than they might a conventional star hero, while he, in turn, understood the crew's process from a filmmaker's perspective,” he observes.
Off camera, little had changed between them. "Even on Master and Vikram, he never created a hierarchy or made us feel distant. He is someone with whom you can still have that brotherly feeling," Pranav says. On DC, acting gave them more reason to talk. Sebastian, one of Das' gang members, demanded a different register from the rougher parts Pranav had played before. Unlike the others around him, the character is defined chiefly by a wish to settle down. "He wants to live a peaceful life. He wants to support his friend through a difficult situation and move away from his own past. That's essentially his mental state," he explains, crediting Lokesh for the freedom to shape the character his own way.
Inside Arun Matheswaran's world
Arun's process, meanwhile, was quite different from what Pranav was used to. “The preparation style I had followed for years was completely broken,” he recalls. “We'd get ready in the morning, find out the sequence, the dialogues and the mood, and then perform. It would take four or five takes just to get the dialogue and the mood in sync.” After a couple of days of feeling tense, he asked a member of the direction team if this was really how Arun worked. “They said, ‘Yes, Pranav. This is Arun Matheswaran sir's style. Welcome to the Arun Matheswaran world,” he remembers with a laugh.
The physical toll matched the intensity. The initial gun-robbery sequence took an entire day to shoot in extreme heat, leaving Pranav barely able to walk the next day. "When you're actually shooting, you don't always realise the strain you're putting on your body. It's only once you're home and lying down that it really hits you," he says.
Arun carried a speaker to set through much of the DC shoot. After wrapping a scene, he would retreat to his room, lay reference tracks over the footage, then call the cast in to watch. "We'd be amazed and wonder if he'd already got the actual music composed," Pranav says. "This is the reference music. If we give this to Anirudh, he will elevate it," Arun told him. That groundwork shows in Anirudh Ravichander’s terrific soundtrack, one of the biggest reasons for the film's success.
A breakthrough closer to home
It took DC for Pranav to be recognised by many in Kerala as a Malayali actor. For the Kozhinjampara native, who entered cinema as a junior artiste on Vineeth Sreenivasan's Malarvadi Arts Club, that recognition has particular resonance. “People who hadn't even noticed me after Narivetta started asking, ‘Are you a Malayali?’ Many directors who didn't know that before started calling,” he says.
“Now, when I go out, I feel DC has helped a lot in people noticing me way more than the recognition I got for Narivetta,” he beams, particularly happy that the response is now coming from audiences in his home state — a place where DC has arguably been celebrated even more enthusiastically than in its home turf of Tamil Nadu.