Joyous Mathew

There  is an ease in his voice. Mathew Joy Mathew appears cool, like he might have been chatting with friends. But he is taking a phone interview, claiming he is still a novice in the world of cinema that his dad has been full of in recent years. Dad Joy Mathew had quietly disappeared after Amma Ariyan, the John Abraham movie in which he played hero. Just as quietly he had come back by writing and directing a film called Shutter. He is, after five years of Shutter, writing his next script called Uncle, which Mathew will be a part of.

 “My dad’s production house is co-producing it and my immediate plan is to be part of it,” Mathew says. He is about five-six films old now, acting wise. But those have not been big enough for his dad to be a critic of. Now, he has acted in a film called Matchbox, that will see him in his longest screen space. “It is directed by my friend Sivaram Mony, who was a super senior at the visual communications college I went to in Coimbatore.” He had heard of Sivaram from the time he joined college, for the short films he made. “And then in the third year of college I met him when he came for a film workshop by veteran filmmaker S.P. Muthuraman.” The friendship continued through the years and no questions were asked when Sivaram called him to be a part of the first feature film he made.

 

“By then I had finished college, worked in V.K. Prakash’s ad agency and done a course in journalism and joined work. When Sivaram called me, I didn’t ask for a script or anything. I said I would be there. I thought it’d be a one or two-day job. But it needed at least 25 days. So I took leave and went to become Victor Antony Sequeira alias Vakkan, an Anglo-Indian based in Kozhikode, and one of the closest friends of Ambu, the lead character,” Mathew says. Visual communications, advertising, journalism, acting, production – Mathew seems to skip a lot, and not mind all the skipping too. That easy tone is there when you ask him what comes next and he has just about the immediate plan, without the long-term what-to-dos. Perhaps some day, write a story, and some day direct.

You might think he’d be scared of the dad who has played many tough roles on screen and is a relentless critic on social media. “No, not at all. He is more a friend than a father. In fact, I criticise him more,” he says with a laugh. They have acted together in two films, but there hasn’t been much screen space together. Mathew had first acted in Cobra, playing Mammootty’s younger version, then did a schoolboy’s role in Philips and the Monkey Pen, worked later on in Bavuttiyude Namathil, Swargathekkal Sundaram and Namukkore Akasam.