Balki’s Chup: Revenge of the Artist is making all the right kind of noise currently at the theatres and city-based actor Rajeev Ravindranathan who is seen in the movie says he is glad many people are liking it. A psycho-thriller that stars Dulquer Salmaan, Shreya Dhanwanthary, Pooja Bhat and Sunny Deol in lead.
Ravindranathan plays the role of DPS Srinivas who is an assistant to Sunny Deol’s character. who are on the hunt for a ‘unique and quirky’ serial killer. “I am a very impulsive sort of character. My expressions sort of set the mood in the movie,” says he, who likes to describe himself as a ‘Bangalore boy who acts in Bombay’. To celebrate the movie he took his family and ‘20 folks from the office to a housefull theatre’. Since the movie was directed by Balki, it had already garnered the right kind of attention.
And Ravindranathan is also not surprised by it since he believes if you are doing Balki films then they are high concept and wild ideas. “My association with Balki goes back to my advertising days when I went to Lintas for a job as a copy writer and he didn’t give me one,” laughs Ravindranathan, adding that he considers Balki as his advertising hero. He continues, “then after I met him in English Vinglish, where he was the producer and a very hands-on producer. To keep everyone in the right frame of mind for the film was quite inspiring.”
Of many other things that he admires about Balki, it was the director’s surety on his concepts that he is in awe of . “His thought and articulation is very strong, I have never met anyone who is so sure at any given point in time, at the same time he is so experimental and trusting of the environment around to try crazy things. He is a genius to me. I emulate him a lot,” says Ravindranathan.
While he can go one about the Balki, he reveals one of the most important reasons for him to do the movie is the Sunny Deol. “For me Sunny Deol is the angry young man on screen, he is perpetually the warrior against the bad. Sunny Deol is my original hero,” says Ravindranathan dramatically. Being a self-proclaimed movie buff, Deol movies have always been on the top of his list.
“Hearing stories from him about how my favorite scenes were shot was truly amazing. For me the minute Balki said you will be an assistant to Sunny Deol. I was immediately like yes done,” says Ravindranathan. Some of the top Sunny Deol movies on his list are Dacait, Betaab, Arjun, Ghayal and Ghatak and the list goes on. “Most of my life, I have been abroad and in the mid ‘80s every two weeks we had a Sunny Deol film in the theatre. It was like a feast,” says Ravindranathan, who would be seen in Netflix’s upcoming series Scoop.