Gautham Karthik's latest Tamil release, Mr X, came more than three years after his last films in the theatre: Pathu Thala and August 16 1947, in 2023. Mr X, too, is a film that began its shoot in late 2023, only for its release to be delayed even further. “But I have been working non-stop,” says Gautham, insisting that he’s on the sets of one of the three movies he has been working on these past three years. “With all the shoot delays and postponements, I did get a lot of time to prepare for each role. But according to public perception, it looked like I was inactive for such a long while. It’s not in my hands, but it’s an image I will have to fix.”
Since he began his career back in 2013 with Mani Ratnam’s Kadal, Gautham insists he’s always hoped for at least one or two releases every year.
“Three releases annually would be ideal, but that’s wishful thinking.” The way he looks at it, the only real solution is to keep working on great content for the audeince to naturally gravitate back towards him. “Such delays do tend to get confusing, and I cannot hide the fact that it affects me. There’s also the continuity factor with all of us trying to maintain one look for the duration of a movie. If I can manage that aspect by making small adjustments, then I will definitely try to squeeze in another project, just to fill up the gap.”
Time-based sci-fi thriller ROOT or Running Out Of Time is expected to be his next release apart from the Netflix series Legacy, with R.Madhavan and Nimisha Sajayan. “It’s a lot of mix and match,” he adds. “I shot for parts of Legacy, and then during a break, I was able to join the sets of ROOT, finish it, and go back to Legacy. As for Mr X, I had to maintain the same look for nine months, so there was no option to shoot something in between.”
Personally, Gautham prefers to act in only one movie at once, describing himself as someone with a “one-track mind”. “There are movies in which I will have the luxury to stay within a role from start to finish. Then there are those times when you have to juggle multiple films at once. As an actor, we need to be flexible.”
He finds this to be true with ROOT, his next release, which falls in the kind of sci-fi genre he’d love to watch even in the streaming space. “But as an actor, there are so many things you need to keep in mind. You might love a script, but you have to hope that your audience loves it too. And then you want the producer to make his profit. Every single factor needs to be considered when you decide to do a movie.”
The actor, who acted in Rajkumar Periyasamy’s first film Rangoon (2017), also describes the Amaran director as “a complete natural.” “The first time I met Rajkumar, he narrated Rangoon to me, and it took four hours! But I didn’t feel like any time had passed. He was so invested in the script that he knew every character, every dialogue and how they would all perform. I’d never seen a director with that much clarity. I knew right from that moment that he was going to become someone huge.”