His latest movie is releasing on Diwali, and there are promotional events to grace and interviews to give. He is also in the middle of a shoot for a new film—by the end of 2010, he will have completed two more projects. In between shoots, he appears in commercials for leading brands and attends fund-raisers for the various charities he supports, apart from the one he runs. He exercises for at least an hour every day. There is rarely a free moment in Tamil superstar Suriya’s life, but lately, a new activity has cut into his busy schedule: Hindi lessons.
Beautiful south: (clockwise from top left) Suriya with wife Jyothika in the 2006 film Sillunu Oru Kaadhal. G. Venket Ram; his brooding, expressive eyes won him critical acclaim in films such as Nandha and Pithamagan; strutting his stuff in the forthcoming film Singham. Hemant Mishra / Mint
For 1 hour every day for the past one month, Suriya has been learning the language that hasn’t lost its potential to raise hackles in his state. Tamil Nadu has been the most vociferous among all the southern states in rejecting Hindi as India’s national language. It is the inability to speak Hindi that prevents many southern stars from acting more frequently in Hindi movies. And it is Hindi that will give Suriya a national platform.
Early next year, he will begin shooting for Ram Gopal Varma’s Raktha Charitra, a two-part biopic based on the life of Telugu politician Paritala Ravi. Vivek Oberoi plays Ravi, while Suriya will appear as his rival, Maatal Suri. “I am in a comfort zone at the moment, and I’m very happy with what I’m doing,” Suriya says. “But I keep thinking of Kamal (Haasan) sir, who acted in so many films in so many languages. He kept breaking stereotypes throughout his career.”
Suriya might ultimately get billed as the second lead in Raktha Charitra, but followers of Tamil movies know exactly where he stands in the pecking order of male leads. He is one of contemporary Tamil cinema’s strongest box-office magnets. His footprint extends across Tamil Nadu as well as to overseas Tamil enclaves in South-East Asia, the US, the UK and the Gulf. His close rival, Vijay, is the darling of rural and small town Tamil Nadu, but Suriya recently made inroads into those territories with action-oriented spectacles Vel and Ayan. Another contemporary, Vikram, is seen as a better performer, but Suriya has also wowed critics with his work in such films as Pithamagan and Vaaranam Aayiram. Besides, the abs have it—neither Vijay nor Vikram possess the perfectly sculpted body that Suriya flaunts in almost all his films. Ultimately, Tamil movies are quite conservative despite a reputation for raunchy song-and-dance sequences and double-entendre dialogues, but all inhibitions are shed when it comes to showing off Suriya’s bare torso.