Roshan Mathew on raising the bar as an actor

When many actors waited out the lockdown for capturing to renew, Roshan Mathew caught the consideration of cineastes with three movies of his that launched on OTT. With Kappela, C U Soon and Choked, the actor has carved a distinct segment for himself in tinsel city. While Kappela proved to be Roshan’s first hit, Mahesh Narayanan’s C U Soon gave the actor the stamp of success. Anurag Kashyap’s Choked was the actor’s first movie in Hindi.

Now, Roshan is busy with thrilling tasks together with the Vikram-starrer Cobra in Tamil; he additionally has Manu Warrier’s Kuruthi and veteran Sibi Malayil’s Kothu and Liquor Island with Suraj Venjarmoodu. However, it’s Sidhartha Siva’s Varthamanam releasing in March, the place he’s forged alongside Parvathy, that will probably be his first theatrical launch since Kappela in March 2020. “It is about the political awakening of Faiza, a student hailing from North Kerala who joins a college under Delhi University. It is about what she sees, the kind of people she meets, the kind of experiences she has, and how all those bring a change in her and mould the activist in her,” says the 28-year-old.

Roshan performs Amal, a pupil chief in the campus the place Faiza is a pupil. Initially, he guides her round, however after some extent he, too, turns into an observer to the adjustments that occur inside Faiza. “[Amal] nudges her into what he believes is the path for her to take. He is an elected student leader who is not afraid to speak up when he sees injustice and to stand up for the rights of the students within the campus,” explains Roshan.

Agreeing that lockdown was a interval of bitter-sweet experiences, he says he’s “thankful for the good things that happened”, particularly tasks as thrilling and surprising as C U Soon. “It is the sort of thing that I wanted to happen at some point in my career and I am just thankful that it happened at a period when there wasn’t much chance for good work or, for that matter, any work coming my way.” So the work that I obtained might punctuate my hibernation interval, which, in some ways, stored me going. So, unusually, there’s a lot that I’m grateful for in 2020.”

Decisive issue

After his début in Puthiya Niyamam (2016) with Mammootty and Nayanthara, Roshan’s filmography didn’t take off as anticipated despite the fact that there was a task in Anjali Menon’s Koode. However, enjoying Ameer, a speech-disabled homosexual teenager in Geetu Mohandas’ Moothon, utterly modified the image. He believes that all the pieces from Anurag Kashyap’s Choked to the roles he’s doing now are a direct consequence of Moothon.

“Otherwise AK [Anurag Kashyap] would not even know about my existence. Moothon helped me get the projects that I have always dreamt about. Everyone who worked in Moothon, from the cast to the technicians were people I wanted to work with before I died or before my career in cinema came to an end,” says Roshan.

Apart from the validation that comes when an actor’s work is accepted, he says such roles give an actor a variety of braveness and vitality to go ahead and take up extra tasks. “But there is something beyond all that, the changes within you, which is like the way I look at myself as a performer or what I think I am capable of and so on,” he factors out.

Roshan feels that Geetu “an actor’s director” gave him a “sense of freedom” and a “kind of flow” that he’s now attempting to find in every challenge of his.“You need projects like that which set a standard. Then you will strive towards exceeding that standard in your future projects. So Moothon, for me, was the most satisfactory project I had worked in and the character I have most been in love with.”

According to the actor, it might be due to Geethu being an actor herself. He goes on so as to add that she is ready to perceive every actor and alter her strategy of route to get him/her to provide you with the finest for that character.

“At the same time, I also felt that I was doing whatever came to me, following my impulses. That is a great balance for a director to strike, you don’t take away the sense of ownership of a character from an actor but you still get exactly what you want out of that character in a particular scene.”

However, he feels that working with Kashyap on Choked helped him break many boundaries that he had imposed on himself in the strategy of filmmaking. “I come from a theatre background which gives you a lot of freedom to explore and improvise. I decided that it does not exist in cinema because there is a limited timeline and a certain objective that would not let me improvise. AK showed me that there was no need to set such close boundaries. He is a director who gets you to explore and he gets enthused when you start straying from the plan and follow your impulses,” Roshan says.

Moving on to Kappela, his first industrial hit, he’s all reward for the director Musthafa. The actor remembers being happy with the approach the movie had formed up whereas watching it in a theatre after its launch. Admitting that he was disenchanted when it needed to be pulled out of theatres on account of lockdown. Roshan factors out it was a movie that went on to do terribly nicely on OTT as it was launched throughout the top of the lockdown when viewers had been hungry for content material.

However, he continues to be lively in theatre as director and actor. “Otherwise, I will suffocate,” Roshan says, including that he’s enthusiastic about the forthcoming Kuruthi, which has him in an ensemble forged of a few of the finest actors in Malayalam cinema. “I have acted with Prithviraj (Koode), so I know what it is like to work with him. In Kuruthi, there is a brilliant cast that has actors like Mamukkoya, Murali Gopy, Shine Tom Chacko, Naslen K Gafoor, Manikandan R Achari, Navas Vallikkunnu and Sagar Soorya.”