She’d make women turn green with envy. Men may fall for her. The comments under a YouTube video on her say it all. Men would for sure have a hard time trying to resist drooling over the sensuous beauty she is. ‘She’ has been around for long and made us clap and whistle for ‘her’ on-screen valour and romance sequences. Karishma, in a few more weeks’ time, would set the world rolling with her ethereal charm on silver screen.
That’s Unni Mukundan for you. The actor’s female makeover video of Chanakyathanthram is breaking the internet, securing the number one spot on YouTube. The actor now has great respect for women, for all the ‘sacrifice’ they undergo to look good! But the man who went through the process does not feel that good. Unni kicked and screamed on the grooming table. “I have heard women in labour tolerate pain equal to breaking 56 bones at a time! This was no better. It was so painful that I literally jumped off the table. I sat there weeping at the end of this ‘extreme step’,” Unni reveals the pains that went behind the making of a beauty. The video tells the rest.
Watching his hardships, people around him were quick to point out the ‘sufferings’ of a beautiful woman. “I was like ‘who asked them to be like that?’ Anyway, I’ll never try it again,” he vouches. Karishma is among the five different avatars he sports in the movie. Look at his recent films, Unni seems to have developed a penchant for trying out different get-ups. Going female actually came up only when the script started evolving. “It was not mentioned to me anywhere in the discussion phase. Kannan bhai (director Kannan Thamarakulam) gave me the confidence to don a female avatar. He observed that my eyes and nose fit the bill and I was game,” he says.
Unni’s look book had only one name on top, Anushka Shetty, his Bhaagamathie co-star. After hearing about Unni’s ‘adventurous’ next, she complimented him by sending him a few snaps of herself in sari. “I like the way she drapes sari. My costumer knew 49 different ways of draping a sari and we went with the Anushka style,” he says. For the first time, Unni brought both his parents on the sets to click a selfie with him. He even fulfilled a long-time wish of his mother’s. “She always wished she had a daughter. Her comment on seeing me in this get-up was ‘you are definitely a daughter for me’. I said she will disappear in two-three days and the son would be back again,” he laughs.
Who is Karishma in Chanakyathanthram? Don’t expect Unni to divulge it so early. “It is a cute episode, you’ll like it,” he says. Would Unni prefer a beautiful wife in the future? “If at all she asks me to take her to a beauty parlour, I’d benevolently obey,” he smiles. The whopping success of Bhaagamathie could win him several offers from Telugu. Also in the pipeline are the projects of Ajay Vasudevan, Marthandan and an associate director’s cap in the Mammootty film Oru Kuttanadan Blog.
