'Meesha': Actor Kathir On Making His Malayalam Debut and Why He's Done Playing Characters Who Are Used 'Just For Sympathy'

Actor Kathir, who began his career with Tamil cinema, has found a new home in the Malayalam industry now. He’s speaking to us over the phone as he shoots for Dulquer Salmaan’s Malayalam film, I’m Game, directed by Nihas Hidayath.

At the same time, August 1 will witness the release of his first Malayalam project Meesha. With the release of Hindi film Dhadak 2 on the same Friday — a remake of his Pariyerum Perumal (2018) — Kathir suddenly appears to be everywhere at once. “I’m surely looking forward to watching Dhadak 2,” he says over the call. “But naturally, my first preference is to be in Kochi to watch Meesha when it releases. With Dhadak 2, I’m curious to see what they’ve changed with the world of Pariyerum Perumal and how they’ve transplanted those lives from Tamil Nadu.”

He agrees that it’s an exciting time in his career with Meesha becoming one of his first films with a darker shade. “In the film, my character’s mother hails from Tamil Nadu, but I do not have a single line in Tamil. It’s a character with multiple shades and a detour from those I’ve done in Tamil. After Pariyerum Perumal, there was a barrage of roles that kept coming my way, all with the intention of casting me as the 'paavam'. But I’m done playing characters just for sympathy. I need to do... more.”

Kathir

In Malayalam, compared to Tamil, he feels both the audience and the market, do not judge you by your previous film alone. “So, if you’ve played a character role in one film, it’s perfectly acceptable for your next role to be that of a hero. There is no demarcation between actors, and we can keep experimenting. Look at a film like 2018; I don’t see so many A-list actors coming together for a story in most other industries. The story is more important than individual performances here.”

Another factor that’s made the switch easier for Kathir is how Malayalam cinema became widely watched outside of Kerala during COVID-19. “I hadn’t seen many Malayalam movies while growing up, but with OTT, we’ve all become fans. Now, when I go home to my parents, their demand is to play a Malayalam movie on the TV for them. It’s become a habit.” 

But as someone who grew up in hostels in and around Erode, right from a very young age, Kathir feels he may have been faster with changing trends if he’d grown up watching more movies. “At times, I feel like I’m two to three years behind when it comes to trends. When I acted in my first movie, I had only watched around 10 films overall. Even my first movie was done because my father was very excited about it. Learning about cinema and obsessively watching movies have all happened to me only after I started acting.” 

Now, Kathir wants to do more complex characters and to balance those with lighter, romantic films. “In terms of my career, there are still phases where I feel confused. But then I try to focus on my performances. In Meesha, I’ve tried to perform to a different meter. Even between dialogues, there’s the room to perform and there’s no rush to finish your dialogues fast.”

This is a lesson he picked up as he completed two seasons of the Amazon Prime series Suzhal: The Vortex. Even though the series divides a long story into episodes, he feels it was shot with all the qualities of a film. “That’s where I figured a new kind of pacing for my performances. The scenes are not about delivering dialogues quickly, fearing that the editor will chop off portions to make the edit brisk. We were given time to pause and to emote even in between lines. That has helped me when I’m performing in Malayalam.” 

It’s this naturalism that he prefers here, he says. “In Malayalam, the effort is to always be as natural as possible. A character may have flavours and a particular meter, but the eccentricities arise from the situations more than characters. That’s what I have tried to do with Meesha. I’ve tried to push myself but without ever crossing the meter of a subtle Malayalam movie performance.”