Director Ram on casting Nivin Pauly in ‘Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai’: Nivin Pauly looked like Jesus!

Chennai, Sep 11 (IANS) Acclaimed Tamil film director Ram has now disclosed why he chose Nivin Pauly to play the role of an immortal man in his eagerly-awaited ‘Yezhu Kadal Yezhu Malai’, which is slated to hit screens on October 1 this year.

Responding to a question posed by a fan on why he had chosen Nivin Pauly to play a pivotal role in the film, Ram said, “Nivin Pauly was the first hero who spoke to me after I’d made my film ‘Peranbu’. After watching ‘Peranbu’, he told me that he wanted us to do a film together.”

The director went on to add, “Nivin Pauly had a beard at that time and he looked like Jesus. He had grown his beard for something else and said he was going to cut it. I told him, ‘Don’t cut it. Let’s make this movie and then you can cut it’. So, I did not ask him to grow a beard for my film. I only made use of his grown beard that was already there.”

A release date teaser that the makers had released recently has only added to the excitement of fans and film buffs.

The teaser released shows Nivin Pauly (an immortal man) feeding a biscuit to a mother rat in a train. Soori, who is presented as a “good man”, is seen lamenting that the biscuits he had bought in Dubai for his son were being fed to a rat.

Nivin Pauly then sets the mother rat down which then makes its way to Soori, who makes no effort to give way to the rat to pass. Eventually, he does give way when Nivin Pauly signals him to.

The teaser then shows Nivin Pauly and Anjali dressed as those in an ancient civilisation. An elephant greets them and makes its way into the jungle as director Ram’s voice is heard saying, “Be it a rat or an elephant, be it a tree or grass, everything is life. They are the souls of our ancestors. With their embrace, we arrive on October 1.”

A title motion poster that the makers released in 2022 had a tagline that said, “When you fall in love, not just your heart, everything including your body and soul will fly.”

For the unaware, one of Tamil cinema’s most respected directors, Ram, started work on this film in Rameshwaram’s Dhanushkodi in 2021 and completed shooting in April 2022. From then, the film has been awaiting a release date.

The film has visuals by cinematographer Ekhambharam and music by Yuvan Shankar Raja.

–IANS

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