Talented sir, from Mysuru!

He bagged the SIIMA award for ‘best actor’ in the short film category last week and since then, Mysuru huduga Poornachandra Mysore has been ecstatic. The talented artiste is now gearing up for the release of his Sandalwood debut BB5, which is hitting theatres this Friday.

Talking about the award that he won for his short film Patinga, he says, “If I were expecting it, I would have prepared a better speech. I was so overwhelmed by the win that I didn’t even talk on stage. When I was asked to say something, I messed up the whole speech!”

Post Patinga, Poorna was offered a number of TV shows and movies, but he chose the latter as he was passionate about making his presence felt in films. “I got an audition call from director Janardhan Rao who was looking for a male lead for BB5. I liked the fact that the script had a proper flow,” he says, of the thriller. The actor also has two more films in his kitty — Dayavittu Gamanisi, which showcases four stories and Orchestra, a rag-to-riches tale.

The fervent performer reveals that his urge to act was fueled when he was in school. “I used to do watch all the plays and think that I could be on stage one day. In college, I started doing mono acting and joined Rangayana, a theatre group that would come to our college and conduct courses for the students.” Soon, his love for filmmaking drove him towards short films and he worked on a plethora of them with his friends Sunil (director of Baarisu Kannada Dindimava) and Joseph. “Even though they never released, we wanted to learn the process of filmmaking, so we used to experiment a lot. We’d watch numerous English movies and build new stories,” he says.

A total cinema buff, Poornachandra would watch Jack Nicholson’s movies and practice performing in front of the camera. This aspiring movie actor is also an avid storyteller and one of the founders of a YouTube channel called Karnataka Entertainment Board (KEB). “We did a spoof on ‘Weekend With Ramesh’ and even did a video with director Pawan Kumar. I used to lie a lot when I was younger and they say -if you know how to lie, you can be a good storyteller!” quips the actor, who’d like to do a role like Nicholson’s in As Good As it Gets or that of Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.

The conversation veers towards his early days in his hometown and Poornachandra gets nostalgic, “There’s a restaurant called Gayatri Tiffin Room which I miss. Also, when it rains in Mysuru — it looks beautiful when you see it from Chamundi Hill — even Switzerland can’t beat the city!”