After his maiden release Chittagong went on to bag two National Award – one for Shankar Mahadevan for the Best male playback singer and one for Bedabrata Pain for the Indira Gandhi award for Best Debut Film of a Director – actor Vijay Varma has a new reason to celebrate.
The Hyderabad-based actor’s latest release Rangrezz has opened to some positive critical response.
The film, a remake of the Tamil hit Nadodigal, features Varma as Pakya, one of the three main characters and is directed by Priyadarshan.
A Film and Television Institute of India trained-actor, Vijay recollects how the casting director, whom he knew from his Chittagong days, called him in mid-2012 with a strange set of instructions: lose weight and grow his hair long.
Having done that Vijay had to wait a few months to find out why. And what started so bizarrely, ended with the director okaying the actor from a distance itself, without interacting with him at all. A few short months later, the film was done.
“The unit was professional and Santosh Sivan, a name to reckon with in cinematography, wrapped the film in record time,” said Vijay, who will next be seen in Anurag Kashyap’s Monsoon Shootout by the end 2013.
The actor recently celebrated his birthday on March 29. Starting his acting days in theatre as a part of Sutradhar in Hyderabad, Vijay has come a long way from his small screen assignments and ad films to land Chittagong and Rangrezz. Talking about his hometown, he said, “I miss Hyderabad a lot but for the present, Mumbai is the place where I would want to be for the days to come.”