During a phone call from Dubai, Keerthy Suresh bursts out laughing as she describes how her mother just recently realised (through interviews) that she would act like a schoolgirl in front of the mirror. “She always wanted to be an actor,” explains Keerthy, whose father is a film producer and mother is an actress.
“At the moment, acting means everything to me.” She is impulsive and does not plan ahead of time. She is still working on my persona in my subconscious mind, but there are no extra rehearsals. “She likes to go with the flow,” explains the 28-year-old, who won the National Award for Best Actress for her performance in Mahanati (2018). “She had no idea what to anticipate. It caught me off guard. Everyone agreed that the performance merited the prize… it was just the frosting on the cake. After the victory, there is a different type of push. It has added a great deal of responsibility. She believes it is only the beginning.”
Keerthy has appeared in films in Tamil, Telugu, and Malayalam. Her filmmakers are also captivated by her spontaneity. “She’s a natural spontaneous performer and a director’s actor.” She has a lot of potentials if she is placed in the right storey and role. In Mahanati, she accomplished a great deal with only the most basic of instructions. “Once that character connected with me, the performance came effortlessly,” says Ashwin Nag, director of Mahanati, a Telugu biopic of actress Savitri.
Keerthy is ecstatic about how the rise of OTTs is altering the environment of movies and storytelling. “There was a period when the population shifted based on the movie… now the crowd changes based on the cinema.” You must have the capacity to read men’s thinking. “There will be a lot more chances,” adds Keerthy, who starred in Amazon Prime’s Penguin and will be Miss India on Netflix in 2020.