Pradeep Ranganathan: 'Acting Brings Me More Recognition than Filmmaking'
The actor-director reveals why he prefers being in front of the camera rather than behind it.
Love Today actor-director Pradeep Ranganathan prefers acting over filmmaking. In a candid interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, he delved into the tedious and somewhat thankless process of writing films. The Tamil star adds that, at the present, he's focused only on his acting career.
“Writing is a difficult process,” he started, revealing that it took him one-and-a-half years to write Comali (2019). “I was [working] in I.T [at the time] so each day I would come home, and I would write one page… I made it a habit.” Finally, many months and several drafts later, he was done. On the other hand, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, writing Love Today (2022) only took him one year.
“Now, the next film I'm writing has taken me nearly two years... and I’ve just come to the interval block,” he explained, though emphasising that he doesn’t wish to be idle in the meantime. Ranganathan continued, “I have this perk of being an actor currently, so let me use it. It is a job that gets me more recognition and love also.”
Currently awaiting the release of Dragon, he admitted that he enjoys receiving all this love from his audience. “I like the love people show me. While they only scream for a director at the end of a film, they love actors for each and every frame they are in. “It is a blessing to be an actor,” he noted.
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In 2025, however, Ranganathan gets the best of both worlds as he’s both written and acted in Love Insurance Kompany (2025) — what is interestingly deemed to be a ‘sci-fi romantic comedy’. As the film is set in the future — the year 2035, he adds, “If it takes another six months or so, [director] Vignesh Shivan might increase the CG levels and make the setting to be 2040, you never know!”