'I’m Not Interested In Being Reduced To An Action Hero': Anthony Pepe

Anthony Pepe doesn’t shy away from talking about the predicament he is in today. After a series of hits such as RDX, Ajagathantharam and Jallikattu, he finds a pattern in the dozens of scripts coming his way today. “The background of the stories may vary, but the bottomline is same,” Anthony says. “Most of them do not look beyond action when it's for me.”

He admits to enjoying performing action roles, but has become a bit bored for the lack of variety in the characters coming his way. Even his lineup in the immediate future too is, “all laced in action, in some way or the other.” But he’s looking to change that as soon as he can. “I’m not interested in being called an action hero. I came into movies to play the lover boy. If you look at my short films, all of them are rom-coms with so much flirting. But now, my career is only fighting,” he jokes. 

Pepe is also aware of the nature of the business and the way it pigeonholes a performer after every success. But instead of completely going against the image he has built, he chooses to find a balance in, “what the audience expect and what I want to do.” Daveed, his most recent release, is what he terms the perfect balance. “It is not the usual boxing drama. As much as it is about boxing, it is also about his emotions and family. A punch only lands when there is a stronger emotion behind it.”

The film releases this week on ZEE5. “It’s the first film I’ve done in which the makers were clear about the preparation that must go in. We trained for six months before going to sets. It’s not practical to pull this off for all films, but there’s a different output when you’re singularly training to be one character for this long, that too in a small industry like Malayalam.”

The numbers speak for themselves. He went down from 96 kgs in his previous film to 74 kgs to become the protagonist Ashiq of Daveed. The film also got him so deeply into the training routine of a real boxer that he allowed the crew to shoot him from anywhere. “Right from the start, we did not want to learn boxing as though it was just for the camera. What makes a performance believable is not the portions in the ring. It’s the little things including the body language or the posture of a boxer. When you train for six months, all that becomes a part of you organically.”

This training is what allowed the crew to keep the boxing sequences original. Because the fight choreography was developed on the sets, the fact that Pepe had become a boxer by then freed them up to shoot however, without taking too long. “Director Govind Vishnu kept visiting us as we trained those six months and we decided to start shooting only once he had felt I was ready." 

The inspiration for him was Arya in Pa.Ranjith’s Sarpatta Parambarai. “But I realised through this process that both the audience and people within the industry looks at you with so much respect once you go through a transformation like I did in Daveed. It’s not just about how I looked or performed in this movie, but they feel I will put in the effort to learn something totally new if a script challenges me. That, in a sense, will hopefully get writers to think of me, no matter what genre. Isn't that a way a break your image?”