Southern Comfort

Before the phenomenal success of the Baahubali franchise, Telugu superstar Prabhas had a 15-year-long career, with almost as many films, in which he reprised the role of the soft romantic lead in movies such as  Mr Perfect and Darling. Then, for five straight years, he immersed himself in SS Rajamouli’s epic. He learned sword-fighting and horse-riding, and convinced audiences that he could wrestle bulls with his bare hands and scale elephant trunks like it was nothing. Since the release of the two-film saga, he’s become a household name across the country, and inverted traditional Bollywood and regional cinema hierarchies.  Suman Naishadham travels to Los Angeles to meet the actor with the baritone giggle

Prabhas dreams of fishing. One day, when the film industry finally gives him the boot, he’ll buy a plot outside Hyderabad, rope in a few old friends and put to work the aquaculture tricks he studied in school years ago. 

But for now, he’s South India’s biggest star since Rajinikanth – and Tollywood would rather he stay just where he is. Today, that’s sun-drenched Los Angeles, where the star is on vacation from shooting his new movie Saaho, a brooding trilingual thriller co-starring Shraddha Kapoor and Neil Nitin Mukesh.

I meet Prabhas at a rented Beverly Hills mansion he’s sharing with his personal trainer, a body-builder and former Mr World, and his pint-sized chef – also his cousin. I’m led inside the capacious cube of glass and steel, and the first thing I notice is a large bag of Tilda basmati rice directly across from the entrance.

Life has been good for the star since the wild success of the Baahubali franchise, the priciest Indian film ever made. The thunderous two-part epic grossed over ₹1,500 crore in less than 50 days, redefined what was possible for Telugu action movies and shook rigid pan-Indian cinema hierarchies. But Prabhas himself, the face of the phenomenon – who tosses a life-sized lingam over a sinewy shoulder in one memorable scene – feels familiar.

“Something very beautiful happened in my life. Baahubali has given something 10,000 times more than what I did before. Or even more than that.” He exhales, and a cloud of vapour smoke escapes his e-cigarette. “After this, I don’t know where I’m going.”