Over the past three decades, veteran actor Shivarajkumar has played the lead in more than 100 films. During this time, the actor, whose last film Tagaru, has just completed its 100-day run, believes he has developed ‘an analytical mind and an intuitive heart’. That’s why he says he remembers never to focus on his achievements—not even the success of Tagaru. “I focus on aspirations instead. For an actor, it’s important to take success and failure in the same spirit. Both are equally dangerous. The best example of someone who understood this is my father, Dr Rajkumar. If he hadn’t balanced success and failure, he wouldn’t have been able to deliver so much variety in his work,” he says.
Given all experience, the actor says he’s still focusing on getting better, and that he takes the time out to do extensive research about the roles he gets. “As a hero, you have to constantly bring in something different,” says the actor, who played a cop in Tagaru. “At this stage of my career, it’s important that the characters I play are designed well. For example, in Kavacha, a remake, I played a visually disabled person.”
He’s got quite a few films coming up. In Rustum, the directorial debut of stuntman Ravi Verma, Shivarajkumar is playing a cop again. “In The Villain, I play a different role. I can reveal just this yet,” he says. And then, there is Pramod Chakravarthy’s Drona, in which he plays a teacher. “As kids, we all played the cop-thief game. Some of my characters in a sense do that on screen, but here, of course, I feel more responsible,” says the 55-year-old.
An actor, singer, dancer, cricketer, and anchor, Shivarajkumar is now planning to get into production. “I have worked under my mother’s production houses—Vajreshwari and Poornima—and now I want to play a more serious role in my own production house, which will be handled by my younger daughter, Niveditha,” says Shivarajkumar.
The actor, who admits to thinking about work all the time, owes all his success to keeping his mind clutter-free when he walks into the sets of a film. He is heartened by the arrival of some fascinating young filmmakers into the Kannada industry. “We still have clichéd films getting released, but we have also got some great stories. It’s really setting up the Kannada industry for a healthy future,” he says.