‘Kantara,’ ‘Toxic’ Star Rukmini Vasanth on Working With Yash, NTR Jr.

Rukmini Vasanth is having a second. Fresh off Rishab Shetty‘s blockbuster “Kantara: A Legend – Chapter 1,” the Indian actor has Yash‘s “Toxic” and a Prashanth Neel movie with NTR Jr. on deck, and her method is clear: women with company who make decisive selections.

The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art graduate, who gained recognition for her nuanced work in the critically acclaimed “Sapta Sagaradaache Ello” movies (2023) reverse Rakshit Shetty, tells Variety that her performance as Kanakavathi in Rishab Shetty’s mythological prequel was rigorously architected from the start.

Set centuries before the occasions of the 2022 sleeper hit, “Kantara: A Legend – Chapter 1” follows the battle over sacred forest land, with Vasanth’s character harboring secret ambitions that in the end drive the narrative. The pivotal nature of her position was established from her first assembly with Shetty and his writing team of Anirudh Mahesh and Shanil Guru, with the character’s rigorously hid motivations and dramatic reveal integral to the movie’s construction from the starting.

“When Sir [Rishab Shetty] called me in for my first narration with him, and he told me upfront that this is all going to hinge on this girl’s sudden twist and the deep-held desire of hers to take over this land that she doesn’t reveal until the last moment,” Vasanth says. “That was very much planned, and that was something that I walked into fully aware of from the first meeting.”

The actor acknowledges the duty was daunting, notably given the large success of the first “Kantara” movie. However, the prequel’s distinct historic setting and visible id helped set up different viewers expectations.

“From all the material that the film’s team had released, audiences were kind of prepared for the fact that this is a very different world that we’re going into,” she explains. “It’s not the same 1990s Kundapura that we had seen in the previous film. This is a very different world, and I think that leveling of the ground helped me because I didn’t feel as if people were expecting to see a certain kind of character.”

Bringing her London drama college training to bear, Vasanth discusses the challenge of calibrating performance type to match the scale of “Kantara: A Legend – Chapter 1” while sustaining emotional authenticity – a marked departure from her breakthrough work in Hemanth M. Rao’s “Sapta Sagaradaache Ello” movies, which she describes as prizing silence and areas within dialogue and interplay.

“One of the beautiful things that I’ve been able to learn over my career is which style and where it belongs,” she says. “In the world of ‘Kantara: Chapter 1,’ some of the more restrained stuff can look too subtle to register because the scale is so large that you need to be able to match that scale.”

Vasanth makes use of a vivid analogy to elucidate her method to calibrating performance. “You kind of need to regulate what is needed of you,” she says. “It’s like speaking – in a quiet living room, you can afford to whisper, but if you’re in the tube, you need to shout a little bit.”

The actor credit her disciplined method to her background, with a father in the navy and a mom who’s a dancer. However, she emphasizes that her time at drama college was the place she really internalized the necessity of preparation and consistency.

“The discipline and preparation gives you the ability to show up regardless of what the outside variables may be,” Vasanth says. “You can’t really be too precious about the kinds of environments that you require in order to put out a good performance for a film that deserves that.”

She describes the difficult manufacturing circumstances on “Kantara: A Legend – Chapter 1,” with fixed rain and restricted taking pictures home windows. “You’d have the crew members carrying these giant rigs up and down a hill. So at that point you can’t really be like, it doesn’t feel right to me. You just have to get on with it and do it as well as you possibly can.”

Looking at her filmography, Vasanth has gravitated towards characters who’re emotionally decisive, even when constrained by circumstances. She attributes this sample to what makes for compelling storytelling.

“Characters that make decisions, that may not be the right ones necessarily or the wrong ones, but that make decisions of some kind, and then that pulls the story along – I think I know what to do in those moments,” she says. “It’s just women with some sort of agency doing things.”

Vasanth’s upcoming tasks embrace “The Elder One” director Geethu Mohandas’ extremely anticipated “Toxic” reverse “K.G.F” star Yash, and a movie with “Salaar” and “K.G.F” filmmaker Prashanth Neel that includes “RRR” lead NTR Jr.

Of “Toxic,” she says that it has challenged her in unprecedented methods. “It’s unlike anything that I’ve taken on before, which has equal doses of nerves to see how it unfolds,” she says. “The working style has been really, really fascinating and very different from anything I’ve encountered. The way that Yash Sir and Geethu approach this film, the scripts, the way that we’ve gone about shooting has been an incomparable experience for me.”

As for working with Neel and NTR Jr., she praises their continued enthusiasm for the craft. “It’s always very lovely when you work with people who come with such a strong body of work, but are very unencumbered by whatever that may have brought. You still see the sense of play and the sense of enjoyment.”

On the subject of pan-India casting, Vasanth suggests the label is more related to the business aspect of cinema than the artistic. She factors to historic precedents, including actor-director V. Ravichandran’s multi-industry manufacturing “Shanti Kranti” (1991).

“I think pan-India films have been happening. They’ve been attempted for a really long time,” she says. “Those are just labels and actors have been working across multiple industries all the time. We’re all very lucky that it’s successful and lucrative also now.”

Vasanth is now working across a number of South Indian movie industries, with upcoming tasks in Kannada, Tamil and Telugu cinema, representing a new era of actors working fluidly across linguistic markets. She declined to remark on reviews of a collaboration with director Mani Ratnam.