“He’s so good looking for a 55-year-old.” On a particularly hot day in Kochi, in one of the villas at the Grand Hyatt on Bolgatty Island, a Mumbai-based costume assistant has just finished the first of two looks for The Hollywood Reporter India cover shoot — and is not quite ready to process what they’re seeing.
The entire crew erupts into laughter. “He turns 75 this September!” corrects a member of the camera crew, also a die-hard Mammootty fan. As the shoot progresses, the costume assistant spends the rest of the shoot in cheerful denial, refusing to accept the Malayalam megastar’s real age.
The Long Game
Mammootty debuted with a movie way back in 1971, when Malayalam cinema was still mostly being shot in black and white. Reiterating a famous punchline from an old Tamil movie, the costume assistant was told that what he assumed was Mammootty’s age was, in fact, lesser than the number of years he’s been acting. He’s been at the absolute top of the pyramid ever since he started taking acting seriously, around 1981.
“There was a gap of nine years when I was practising as a lawyer in Malabar, not because I wanted to be a lawyer, but for safety. You can say I was preparing to become an actor then (between 1972 and 1981),” says Mammootty, admitting that it’s more accurate to say he began his full-fledged career 45 years ago.
What makes this arc all the more layered is that the man who would become one of Malayalam cinema’s most valuable brand names was once embarrassed to be called Mammootty. In school, he often used an alias with classmates. “I was just a teenager then and I used to feel my name was too old-fashioned, so I called myself Omar Sharif. In my second year of law college, all of us had to introduce ourselves to our teacher. I simply stood up and said my name was ‘Prem Nazir’ (the biggest Malayalam superstar before Mammootty and Mohanlal),” he shares.
Several years later he ran into the same teacher when he was shooting for a movie. She called him over and said, “You have kept your word.”
His career has spanned multiple revolutions in Malayalam cinema and a grand total of over 400 films. These films have won him the National Award for Best Actor thrice and the Kerala State Award for Best Actor, 10 times. Most recently, he won the State Award for his performance as Kodumon Potti in the 2024 black-and-white horror classic Bramayugam.
But he downplays even these formidable achievements as something that happened almost by accident. He explains, “See, Malayalam is a small industry with limited budgets. We’re trained to complete a full film within 15 to 20 days, unlike today when we shoot for 150 days. That is why I was able to complete 400 films. In the ’80s, there were years in which I completed more than 30 films, sometimes as hero, sometimes as villain, character actor… everything.”
In older accounts, he speaks of days — and nights — when he was shooting for as many as three to four films simultaneously. Sleep was often hard to come by, and rest was managed as he ran from the sets of one film to another. Not that he has ever felt tired of this process, even today. He explains, “Of course, there have been days when I’ve felt physically tired, but not mentally. You can rest for one day, but you cannot rest for a week or a month. Even when I go on holidays, I relax only because I know there is a movie to start once I return.”
Passion and Greed
“To die on the stage” — that is what he calls this insatiable desire to keep acting. It’s a phrase that carries more weight when one understands the tradition it is born from. He recalls the great Tamil actor M.R. Radha, who continued to perform well into his final years. On occasions when Radha required the assistance of two people just to be brought to set, he would transform entirely the moment the director called ‘action’. “He would have full strength during the shot. But when they called cut, he needed those two people to hold him.” For Mammootty, this is not a cautionary tale. It is an aspiration.
“This is not just with me but with most actors. The desire to keep acting is like the desire to keep breathing… an actor is alive as long as the person is alive,” he says. It’s the sort of passion towards acting that has only grown over the years, with the same amount of nervousness each time he faces the camera. Mammootty, to this day, believes his blood pressure rises the second the camera starts rolling. For him, the first step towards becoming an actor is the act of “hiding that pressure”.
It’s a craft he has honed through sleepless nights in an industry that could never afford to give actors their time to prepare or get fully into character. If he played a doctor, he could not afford to study their mannerisms or gesticulations. “But you’re always absorbing the body language of people you meet. When it’s time to perform, they appear in front of you and you behave like them,” he explains.
When he speaks of this passion, he uses an unusual analogy to explain how he thinks, saying, “India is a country of 1.4 billion people, which means there are 1.4 billion characters. In Kerala, there are around 35 million people. Even if you cut that number by half, there are 1.75 crore Malayali characters and I’m greedy to play all of them!” He calls this a very “human” trait about him.
“After a point, it’s not about money. See Mukesh Ambani — he has already made more than he can spend. Similarly, we often see politicians above 90 who are still active. I’m just greedy to keep acting and it’s got nothing to do with the perks acting has to offer.”
At times, he admits that this “greed” to perform manifests even with the smallest of micro expressions and the simplest of lines. When shooting for Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar (2000), a film that required Mammootty to mouth lines in the Queen’s English, he remembers feeling frustrated with director Jabbar Patel for asking for as many as 15 to 16 retakes for certain scenes. For the director, he was spoilt for choice — the actor was giving him a new variation for each dialogue across all 15 takes. Incidentally, this was the performance that brought Mammootty a record third National Award.
“When you know your lines, you have the space to keep playing around with the delivery. The same emotion can be conveyed in different ways, even when the words are the same. I enjoy this a lot,” he says.
Risk Merchant
What has helped actors such as Mammootty, and his long-time collaborator and fellow superstar Mohanlal, perform at this level has been the precision with which they balanced commercial cinema with serious cinema made by masters. At the time of this interview, Mammootty is gearing up for the release of Patriot, which co-stars Mohanlal. It’s being made with one of the biggest budgets in Malayalam industry history and also stars Nayanthara, Fahadh Faasil, Kunchacko Boban and Revathi, all playing characters that stand above their individual stardom.
Mammootty reminds us that he’s also shooting Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Padayatra, a “tragedy about a doctor who gives his all to his people”. Two of his three previous collaborations with the master director resulted in National Award wins for Mammootty — Mathilukal (1990) and Vidheyan (1994).
Incidentally, Padayatra is also being produced by Mammootty. Even his role as a film producer has been entirely in service of his commitment towards acting. Instead of choosing to produce films that are sure to work at the box office, his firm MammoottyKampany backs only those films that are experimental and risky by design.
“I only produce films no other producer wants to make with me,” he says, defending his decision to produce and act in last year’s Kalamkaval, a film in which he played a serial killer who murders as many as 31 women. He also played an out-of-work detective in Dominic and the Ladies’ Purse, apart from producing and starring in Kaathal - The Core, in which he played a married man finally coming out of the closet. In 2022, he made the hyper-experimental Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam, directed by indie cinema’s own Lijo Jose Pellissery.
“What do you think of me playing a vampire?” he half-jokes, alluding to one of the few remaining archetypes he hasn’t yet mastered.
Oh Brother
But with Patriot, he returns with a film he believes will “change the formula of multi-starers”. It is a film that also brings him back on screen with Mohanlal after a gap of 18 years. Every time the two have come together in the last three decades, it has resulted in movies that changed the course of their industry.
“Patriot is a film that is being driven by content,” he says. “It is not driven by stardom. Again, we’re experimenting, even though it has all the commercial elements. It is not just a film in which two heroes come from either side just to shake hands. It’s not a formula film.”
The teaser of the film features sequences in which both Mohanlal and Mammootty join forces to fight what appears to be a common enemy. “But again, these shots are not what’s important. We are friends in the film. Most importantly, this is a film that is based on an incident I hope never takes place in reality,” he says.
Mammootty and Mohanlal have so far acted in 55 films together, with Patriot becoming the 56th. In no other movie industry have the two biggest stars been available for each other across so many movies and over such a long span of time. So, when he’s asked about the first day on set with Mohanlal after this gap of 18-plus years, it’s almost poetic that his answer is: “Just normal. There was nothing special about it.” These aren’t the words you’d expect to hear from someone about a special bond that was forged on sets, between shots and before superstardom. “We are already in rhythm and there’s no need to create any rhythm,” he says with a laugh.
As he sees it, the magic of the two of them returning to act together exists precisely because neither has ever bothered to carry the weight of stardom on their shoulders. “We are normal human beings. We are friends — or you can call us really close friends. Our families are close too, so there’s no question of either of us throwing our weight around on sets. On my first day of Patriot, I was accompanied by his manager (Anthony Perumbavoor). That was because my manager Anto Joseph was in Colombo, looking after him. That’s how it has been with the both of us.”
The Bigger Picture
The two of them have been the pillars upon which the Malayalam industry has rested on for over 40 years now. But for all that he has done for Malayalam cinema, there’s still one wish he wants to fulfil. “As a Malayali, I just want Malayalam cinema to go international. Today, the language barrier no longer exists. We were making good films even earlier, but we did not have the modern technology to take it to a larger audience. I want Malayalam cinema to reach more and more people,” says the 74-year-old megastar who, as one costume assistant will insist until their dying day, “doesn’t look a day over 55”.