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Dubai: “We conceived it as a very small movie. We thought it would hit the theatre with a good reception, but not such an amazing response. And it’s a massive hit now!”
“Small” is doing some seriously heavy lifting there as he talks about this year’s monstrous Malayalam box-office hit Bethlehem Kudumba Unit.
Sangeeth Prathap and the team behind the feel-good entertainer led by Nivin Pauly may have set out to make an unassuming comedy about family, romance and the delicious chaos that comes with both. What they got instead was a Rs 3billion-plus box-office phenomenon.
Surprisingly, the Girish AD film didn’t arrive flexing its muscles as a grand spectacle or a star-powered extravaganza. It simply found its audience; families, youngsters and repeat viewers who kept coming back for more; and then grew into the kind of blockbuster its makers clearly hadn’t seen coming.
For Prathap, who plays the mischievous Joel, the scale of that affection still seems slightly surreal.
“As it’s a small, comical movie, getting so much acceptance from the audience for such a simple movie is very overwhelming.”
And apparently, once wasn’t enough for some fans.
“The exciting thing is I got messages on Instagram saying they have watched the movie six, seven, eight times. That’s something unpredictable.”
The film, released on August 21 as an Onam entertainer, stars Prathap as Joel alongside Pauly, Baiju, Suresh Krishna, Vinay Forrt, Roshan Shanavas and Shyam Mohan. Girish AD directed and co-wrote it with Kiran Josey.
And audiences apparently aren’t content with watching it just once.
“The exciting thing is I got messages on Instagram saying they have watched the movie six, seven, eight times. That’s something unpredictable,” he said.
Six, seven, eight times? At that point, you’re practically part of the Kudumba Unit yourself.
A film set that felt like home
The movie reunited Prathap with Girish AD, the director who gave him a major acting break in Premalu. It also brought him back into a creative circle populated by people he already knew well.
“For me, working with Girish — the director Girish AD, who gave me a big break in Premalu — it’s like my home,” Prathap said. “I’m very comfortable, very easy to work with. It’s the only set where I go without any preparations.”
“There are a lot of friends there. Mamitha, Shyam, and all the technicians were my very close friends, so it’s like a very comfortable set.”
Or, as he summed it up rather neatly: “Actually, it’s like a gathering of friends.”
That familiarity seems particularly apt for a film whose supporting characters became such an important part of its appeal. Co-writer Kiran Josey has also spoken about how Prathap’s Joel and Roshan Shanavas’ Glickson took on lives of their own, saying the actors ultimately brought more to the characters than the writers had imagined on paper.
Joel could easily have been played simply as the resident clown — silly, mischievous and delightfully unserious. But Prathap was interested in the affection underneath the comedy.
“It’s actually a funny character. It’s a very interesting character. On one side he is very funny, he is very silly, but on the other side, when his brother got broken, he treated him with so much concern. He stands with him,” Prathap said. “That was the strength of that character.”
That mixture of absurdity and affection is also very much in Girish AD’s wheelhouse. The director has spoken about allowing humour to emerge naturally from awkward characters and situations rather than having characters behave as though they know they are in a comedy.
‘We approached it with genuineness’
For all the enormous numbers now attached to Bethlehem Kudumba Unit, Prathap keeps returning to how simply the film was conceived.
“When we heard that script, we considered it a good movie. We approached it with very much genuineness,” he said.
“Especially Girish, he just conceived it as a small movie with a lot of emotions, love and heart. That may be the result.”
It is an interesting contradiction: one of Malayalam cinema’s biggest commercial successes arrived without pretending to be a mammoth spectacle.
Instead, Girish AD built a romantic comedy around Justin and Ashley, played by Pauly and Baiju, while surrounding them with an ensemble of eccentric relatives, friends and neighbours. The director had conceived the basic idea years earlier, even before Premalu, before eventually developing it with Josey.
Prathap, meanwhile, doesn’t have much time to bask in the glow of that blockbuster. His latest film, It’s A Medical Miracle, puts him in a very different position.
This time, he is the leading man.
“For me, all movies are like my first movie,” he said. “Especially this movie; it’s the one which I am leading.”
You might assume that walking into your first lead role with a Rs3 billion-plus blockbuster immediately behind you would do wonderful things for the confidence. Apparently, Sangeeth Prathap didn’t get that memo.
‘I’m still insecure. I’m still tense’
“What makes me curious and tense is this is something where I break my comfort zone,” Prathap said.
“Here in this movie, I’m trying many new things as an actor. So I don’t know how it will be, and I hope it’s a proper experiment. But in a very commercial way, we try to communicate to the people, and we hope they will love the movie.”
Prathap’s journey to leading-man territory hasn’t exactly followed the conventional movie-star playbook. He began his film career working as an editor before gaining increasing recognition as an actor. And even with successful films behind him, there is no grand declaration that he has “arrived”.
Quite the opposite.
“I’m still learning. I’m still insecure. I’m still tense,” he said. “But I’m trying my best. I’m trying to break my comfort zone. That’s the only drive I have to do more movies.”
It’s refreshingly unstarry for a man coming off Malayalam cinema’s biggest worldwide grosser.
More significantly, Prathap doesn’t seem particularly interested in spending the next few years repeating the kind of characters that audiences already know and love him for.
“When I’m hearing a lot of movies with the same templates which I’m doing, I never had any excitement,” he said.
Then came It’s A Medical Miracle and one rather epic narration.
“When I heard the script, I heard the narration for four hours, I think. But that four hours was something which broke all my decisions, and I decided to do something new. I just jumped into that pool.”
Four hours is a serious narration. But clearly, something worked.
Why he waited to become a leading man
Interestingly, It’s A Medical Miracle isn’t the first opportunity Prathap has had to headline a film.
He says other lead roles came his way, but he wasn’t prepared to say yes simply because his name would appear at the top of the poster.
“I got many opportunities to do as a lead, but I was not ready to do it because of many reasons,” he said.
“Sometimes the script was not exciting. But when I heard this movie, I felt it’s equally exciting, it’s equally experimenting, and also something which fits.”
That willingness to wait is telling.
The supporting roles gave him the luxury of making an impact without carrying an entire movie on his shoulders. The Medical Miracles removes that safety net.
And Prathap seems to know it. He describes the film as an experiment, particularly in its storytelling and use of sound.
“It’s a very experimental movie. We have given so much importance to sound. This movie has a new narrative style and so many exciting factors,” he said.
He isn’t giving away too many details about where that experimentation takes audiences, but he is prepared to make one fairly bold promise.
“I’m giving an assurance that you won’t leave the theatre with disappointment. You will get something new.”
That’s quite a guarantee from a man who, minutes earlier, cheerfully admitted that he remains insecure and tense.
But perhaps that contradiction sums up Prathap rather nicely at this point in his career.
He has Premalu behind him. He now has the record-breaking Bethlehem Kudumba Unit. And rather than immediately retreating into the comfort of playing variations of the funny, lovable guy audiences have embraced, he is choosing a project that makes him nervous.
Married, 30 and apparently age-defying
There was one other revelation during our conversation that caught me completely off guard. When I asked Prathap whether his newfound popularity meant women were approaching him with marriage proposals, he calmly informed me: “I am already married.”
Clearly, I hadn’t done enough homework.
“You look like a child,” I told him, before discovering that he is, in fact, 30.
His response to the suggestion that life — married, 30, with blockbusters behind him and his first lead role ahead — must be looking pretty good was characteristically restrained.
“Hopefully. I still have a long way to go!’
But when the conversation returned to It’s A Medical Miracle, his answer was far more emphatic.
“This movie will be my after and before,” he said.
The phrase may have arrived in reverse, but the sentiment couldn’t be clearer.
For an actor who began behind the scenes, built recognition through supporting roles and has now found himself inside one of Malayalam cinema’s biggest box-office stories, It’s A Medical Miracle represents something more personal: the moment he steps out without the safety of an ensemble and asks audiences to follow him.
And after watching the “small movie” he helped make become anything but small, Sangeeth Prathap is all set to find out what happens when the spotlight is finally his.
