From Bulked up hunk' to unkempt upstart'

A man with an unkempt beard and long uncombed hair gets into a bus and moves among the passengers. Some of them stare at him but the man is unruffled. He carries a backpack from which he extricates a pair of reflective shades and dons them attracting curious stares.

Some of the passengers murmur to each other, “This is the new generation who are not bothered about their appearances or behaviour. Just look at the attitude he is throwing.” The bearded man overhears all this in crystal clear perfection through his ear piece and tries hard to stifle a smile.

The bus comes to a halt at the South bus stop in Kochi and the man gets down. He is none other than actor Unni Mukundan who is donning the role of a lazy, flirty, rebellious, devil may care, arrogant and the leader of a group of ruffians Siddharth in the film Avarude Ravukkal.  Unni adds, “Some of the people in the bus were real passengers and we wanted to capture the real live emotions of people. I took a ticket and sat down among the people. After a while I started having doubts if the people genuinely did not recognise me or whether they had forgotten me? The fun part was when I could hear the comments of the passengers who called me arrogant.” Unni mentions that when the makers sought him out to play this character, he was initially not convinced but now all such doubts are behind him.

This is one of the two getups that Unni appears in the film; the other one is a direct contrast to his unkempt appearance where he sports a clean shaven college boy look. Unni says, “This could be one of my most challenging roles so far because I am nowhere like the unkempt Siddharth. It has been a very fun oriented role and my character should be a mirror image of the hypocritical society we live in and I have seen such characters in real life too. The film has a message but all interlaced with humour.”  

The film is directed by Shanil Muhammed but was in the news when its producer Ajay Krishna committed suicide. There were a lot of rumours surrounding the suicide including financial problems and an unsatisfactory performance by the actors in the film’s preview. Unni addresses these rumours and explains, “There is no financial difficulty and Ajay’s father has taken over the production mantle now. The delay in starting the shoot was owing to the legal complications of getting the name changed etc. People started giving dramatic reasons but even when the shoot of the film was not over how can a preview be seen? The dubbing and other work is going on and the teaser will be out soon.”