I Was Told to Follow Ravi Teja’s Career Path: Kartikeya

Kartikeya’s mind is less chaotic today. After his sophomore film, RX100, made a splash in 2018, none of the films that followed for the next couple of years could replicate a similar level of success. His latest, the quirky comedy, Bedurulanka 2012, satiated his nearly five-year-long hunger for success. “More than happiness, it’s relief,” the actor says with a smile. “We should be able to work peacefully in the first place. And failure often leads to petty obstacles like someone opposing a creative decision just because my previous didn’t work at the box office. Likewise, because a film of mine didn’t work out, a producer might impose restrictions on the budgeting front. Things like these can be quite annoying. The thing is that regardless of the success or failure, we have to pour in efforts to make a new film from scratch. Unless we are a massive star, things don’t work out automatically. And when a film works out, the petty and irritating things that you have to hear come down.”

As someone who has done around ten films in the past six years, it is to be noted that Kartikeya worked mostly with debut filmmakers, barring Vikram K Kumar and H Vinoth in Gang Leader (2019) and Valimai (2022), respectively. Identifying new talent can be tricky and it’s a game in which Kartikeya sometimes succeeded and at times, failed. Speaking about the issue that he finds with most of the filmmakers approaching him, the actor candidly shares, “Some filmmakers try hard to convince the hero. When I turn a script down, I might give reasons as to why it didn’t work for me. Some filmmakers might get to know of these reasons, and come up with something just to please me—say, by adding a couple of heroic moments. If someone comes and starts the narration with, ‘Sir, this film will be for you what Varsham (2004) was for Prabhas, Simhadri (2003) was for NTR and Okkadu (2003) was for Mahesh Babu..’ they assume I will be impressed,” Kartikeya laughs. “I also hear things like, ‘Sir, we will do exactly what they did in KGF.’ There will be such attempts. But only when you find a genuine script, it will go to the next stage.”

The actor has stated in the past that there were suggestions from people around him to cement himself as the next mass hero in Telugu cinema. While he admits he didn’t give in to such temptations, he asserts that it’s easy to get carried away. How does he manage to shut down the exterior noise and just focus on the work? “I never felt like I was the next mass star, to be frank. But people were telling me things like, ‘Look at the industry, there is a slot available for a young actor now. You should pick stories like Ravi Teja did during his formative years as a star. Nobody is doing such films now.’ When I heard such observations, I thought that maybe we should do such films but after 90 ML (2019) my thought process changed. I realised that we cannot ape another star’s pattern and we have to go through our own journey,” Kartikeya says. “Maybe if I work hard and do well, ten years later, people might advise a newbie to fit into the Kartikeya slot.”