Prajwal Devaraj knows that nothing fails like success. The actor who was at his peak till 2013, had an average outing in 2014 and 2015, and he is desperate to walk out of the gloomy shadows of prosaic scripts. For him, the spark to bring back the blaze of popularity now lies in
Bhujanga, his next film which will release this Friday. For the first time, Prajwal has donned the avatar of a typical street ruffian in terms of his look and dialect.
“I had to break away from the lover boy image and needed a certain rawness in my look for this film since I play a petty thief. After Arjuna, I did get couple of films, but I chose Bhujanga only because it was new to me in terms of characterisation and looks. Another reason was script writer B A Madhu,” he informs.
Directed by Jeeva who makes his debut with the film, Prajwal states that unlike before, he has made sure to spend more time with the director to go into detail about his characterisation and dialogues. “I used to blindly follows directors, which misfired at certain times. With Madha Mathu Manasi, which is another of my upcoming films, I have started to spend more time on the sets after the shoot is over. I am seeing the difference and hope it reflects on screen too,” he informs.
Prajwal mentions that the film is about a simple love story combined with comedy in a village backdrop. “I am dressed in typical village outfits complete with a patta patti chaddi and lungi. I sport long hair and a beard while the beedi adds to my look as a typical petty thief. I have spoken Mandya dialect and so the portrayal of my character is different from what my fans were used to,” he says and adds with a chuckle that while all these years he was the perfect son for families in Karnataka, this film will probably erase that image.
According to the actor, he has spent time analysing people views about his characters. “They like my anger and smartness which I carried in my initial films, Gelaya or Bhadra. So, while I have always felt that I should go behind good scripts, I have also realised that it is more important to give what the audience expects and I will follow it in my future films,” he mentions.
Indicating how out of touch he was with action movies, Prajwal says that he was scared doing action sequence in Bhujanga. “Probably it has been a long gap since I did not got the opportunity to do action sequences. And when I actually shot a major action portion, I could feel the difficulty, but I pushed myself and it has come out well,” he says.
