Samyuktha Menon calls it luck. And luck goes back to a time Prasobh Vijayan comes into her life through a mutual friend, as a filmmaker who will lift her from being a really unconfident young actor to falling head over heels in love with cinema. Now Lilli — the movie — is known; everyone is watching the scary teaser of a pregnant woman, kidnapped, and in an unknown, creepy looking place. Samyuktha loved being Lilli and she thought it will be a while before the movie comes out and she will get called for another. But then Theevandi too came to her the same time, and she played Devi, opposite Tovino Thomas.
“If you are writing my story, you have to mention Sarathi chettan of E4Entertainment, which is distributing Theevandi, and Prasobh. It is these two people who taught me so much about cinema, gave me many references and made me watch so many international movies that I am now totally in love with acting. It is such a beautiful art form,” Samyuktha says in an interview. She doesn’t know what made Prasobh narrate the story of Lilli to her. “This is a man who was making a movie with actors like Isabelle Fuhrman (for Orphan) and Natalie Portman (for Black Swan) in his mind. My character has a lot of depth. I didn’t think I was a good enough actor till he gave me the confidence. And Lilli became a beautiful experience.”
When Samyuktha thought there will be time for her next movie, Appu Bhattathiri, editor of Lilli, went ahead and suggested her name to the Theevandi team, where he was editor again. Samyuktha didn’t even have time to cut down the extra pounds she gained to play the pregnant Lilli. “I enjoyed that for I love having food and didn’t have to worry about weight gain,” she says.
In Theevandi, she became a village officer in love with a man called Bineesh Damodaran. “The director Fellini is like captain cool. When he narrates a story, you tell yourself, isn’t that me? I play the daughter of Suraj Venjaramoodu and Neena Kurup and in the song that got released and brought me all this sudden attention — Jeevamshamayi — you could see me slap Tovino’s character many times. There is a dialogue in it that became popular, where I say you can kiss me after you stop smoking. It was a wonderful 47 days (of shooting),” she says. Theevandi would release on May 4, Lilli in July.
Samyuktha is not keen to talk about her days before cinema, when she was trying out the medical entrance exams after a shot at engineering, as a young girl in Palakkad. But then a few Facebook photos brought her to modelling, to the inside pages of a popular magazine and then to cinema. “I was then and I am now what I have put as my Whatsapp status — a totally confused free soul. I don’t think I want to go back to a college life, surrounded by walls. For the same reason, I love travelling, where there are no walls and no time frames,” says the Palakkad kaari.
