ONE-WOMAN ARMY

National award winner Keerthy Suresh is all set to wow you with an emotional thriller

- PRIYANKA BHADANI

Ever since she won applause in the Telugu industry for her performance in Mahanati (2018), a biopic of yesteryear actor Savitri, Keerthy Suresh has wanted to do a Tamil film that could do for her what Mahanati did for her in Telugu. Penguin, simultaneously shot in Tamil and Telugu, could be that film, she feels. It is set to release on June 19 on Amazon Prime Video. In it, she plays a pregnant woman in search of her missing child. “This is an emotional thriller,” she says. “I am happy to be part of a genre I have not tried before.”

Having mostly worked with established directors, working with debutant Eashvar Karthic might have been challenging. “But it never seemed like I was working with someone new,” she says. “It seemed like he had done a lot of movies. From the way he narrated the script to the way he executed it, it was beautiful. I am not sure if a lot of debutant directors are like that.”

The film deals a lot with motherhood, so it was natural that the first person she called to prepare for the role was her mother, actor Menaka. “But then, I relied mostly on Eashvar’s brief,” she says. “His script was inspired by his wife’s pregnancy. I used to ask him a lot of questions.”

Except for Mahanati, which, as a biopic, required a lot of research, her preparation for roles has been fairly simple. “Before the film begins, I mostly try to crack the look. Moving on to the finer nuances of the character happens only when I go on the set,” she says.