From his breakout role in Mani Ratnam’s Gitanjali in the late 1980s to his upcoming 100th film, Akkineni Nagarjuna has made four decades feel like the beginning.
The son of Akkineni Nageswara Rao, one of the legendary titans of Indian cinema, he has been working since the mid-1980s on films such as Mani Ratnam’s 1989 Indian National Film Award-winning romantic drama Gitanjali, Ram Gopal Varma’s 1989 He has had a great career with groundbreaking films like 2019’s groundbreaking action thriller ‘Shiva’, the devotional epics ‘Annamaya’ and ‘Suri’. Ramadas. ” He has also worked extensively in Bollywood, including Ayan Mukerji’s 2022 fantasy action film Brahmastra, played the lead role as a former CBI official opposite Dhanush in Sekhar Kammula’s Kubera, and played the villain opposite Rajinikanth in Lokesh Kanagaraj’s Coolie. Alongside his acting career, he heads one of India’s most prestigious production and technical facilities, Annapurna Studios. In an interview with Variety, he reflects on what shaped him, what still drives him, and the groundbreaking projects he hopes to present with the greatest impact.
Nagarjuna narrates the exact moment when his identity as an actor crystallized. His earlier Telugu films did well, but it was ‘Gitanjali’ that fundamentally changed the game, he says. “I think that’s when I found my feet and the ground I needed to tread on,” he says. “It started from there. Then ‘Shiva’ came along and that locked everything, sealed everything.” He places the change in a broader cultural context. Around 1988-1989, audiences, especially young people, were ready for something different, especially in South Indian cinema. “The 16-, 17-, 18-year-old students at the time wanted a change, especially from the films that were being made in the South. So we made that change, and I was lucky enough to make that change early.”
He says that working in multiple Indian film industries has strengthened his belief that stories rooted in Indian culture and sentiment are the ones that last. Foreign places, Western sensibilities, he suggests, are passing the stage. “For me in the last few decades, it has always been rooted in culture, rooted in feelings and emotions. That’s what people liked.”On the issue of star culture, he candidly said that the Telugu and Tamil industries operate on different levels of audience enthusiasm. It goes back to his father’s time and the legendary NT Rama Rao. “The stars’ fans are immense. There are so many of them. They really respect them and are really looking forward to the movie. It’s incredible that they want to be associated with a particular star.”
Among his most important personal projects, Nagarjuna talks about the films “Annamaya” and “Sri Ramadasu,” which blended devotional themes, music and mainstream appeal in a way that few Telugu commercial films had attempted at the time. The 1997 K. Raghavendra Rao film cast him as Annamacharya, a 15th century Vaishnavite poet-saint who composed thousands of kirtanas dedicated to Lord Venkateswara at Tirumala. This kirtana remains one of the most widely heard devotional works in the Telugu-speaking world. When he first read the script, he didn’t fully anticipate the weight of the piece. “I felt a change in myself from the first schedule,” he recalls. “The members of the unit just worked with respect, not with me. It was so important to them just to be a part of that movie. It was like they were working for God.” The character artists had reportedly approached the director to simply be involved as background personnel. Nagarjuna attributes the long absence of such films from Telugu cinema to the silence of mythological and devotional traditions of the 1950s and 60s, which audiences missed. He read the Annamaya Kirtana (hymn) word by word with the writer. “It was quite a spiritual awakening for me.”
“Shri Ramadas” also committed a similar crime. Nagarjuna learned in his school textbooks the story of the holy composer, the story of the king who imprisoned him, a sealed room with an opening only at the top, through which he was fed. “I learned this since I was a child, and that’s how I made this film. It was also a very great awakening for me.”
His father is a subject that Nagarjuna approaches with both pride and philosophical prudence. Legacy, he argues, cannot be transferred. “A legacy cannot be inherited. A legacy cannot be given. A legacy must be respected. And a legacy comes after you prove yourself.” While he considers himself lucky to have lived up to his father’s reputation, it is clear that his sons, actors Naga Chaitanya and Akhil Akkineni, are facing the same challenges independently. “That’s for the people to decide. We just have to try. That’s my view.”
When asked what kind of structural changes have enabled Telugu cinema’s recent global breakthroughs such as ‘Baahubali’, ‘RRR’, ‘Pushpa’ and ‘Kalki’, Nagarjuna’s answer breaks conventional wisdom. The scale has always been there, he insists. Telugu and Tamil films were making inroads in markets including Japan long before the current wave. What hasn’t changed is the filmmakers’ own sensibilities. Directors return to villages for festivals, rooted in the tradition of telling larger-than-life stories. “Most directors still go back to their villages on their days off,” he says. He describes his current collaborators, who grew up throwing coins and confetti at movie theater screens in village theaters. “They see their heroes as larger than life, and they’re also deep-rooted. That’s the combination.” The new element, he suggests, is just that technology has finally caught up with that ambition. “With new knowledge and technology, they’re making breakthroughs. And their dreams have always been larger than life, but they’re putting out these movies that are called scaled-up. They don’t know what else to do.”
At this stage in his career, Nagarjuna says he consciously expanded his range as an actor. He explains that the role of ‘Kubera’, a former CBI officer who navigates between poverty and extreme wealth, is exactly the role he is looking for. “I want to experiment. I want to try different things.” A small but important part of “Brahmastra” is quoted in the same breath. “Now I don’t have to be the lead man. And I have to be the lead man. Both. I’m working on both. My options have become much wider. I’ve opened doors.” The starting point as a producer has always been commercial feasibility – “the movie has to play well, the movie has to make money,” but he sees that calculus becoming more nuanced. A new generation of audiences is paying attention around the world, and movies no longer need to fit a template. “This gives you a wide range of options.”
Nagarjuna is candid about the recently launched motion capture facility at Annapurna Studios, spearheaded by SS Rajamouli and used for key sequences in Varanasi, which should have been implemented sooner. He cited the “Avatar” series and pointed out that parts of “Brahmastra” were captured using a motion capture facility in Bulgaria. Having Mr. Rajamouli use the Annapurna Research Institute first was an ideal launch platform. “When Rajamouli was going to shoot ‘Varanasi’ there, what better platform to launch it?” But this facility alone is not enough, he stresses. Directors and cinematographers need to be trained on it, they need to understand it. “It will definitely make life easier for actors. You can achieve the impossible there.”
The Annapurna Institute of Film and Media, more than a decade old, was born out of his and his father’s belief that filmmaking in India has only been passed down informally from mentor to assistant, on set and on set. “My father always said, why is there no training ground for such an important industry in this country?” The college has been developed in partnership with the Jawaharlal Nehru University of Architecture and Fine Arts to offer both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, covering screenwriting, editing, photography, acting and directing, with students specializing after two years. The location itself, in a fully operational studio, is part of the philosophy. “There’s no better place to be in the middle of everything happening, with a proper, full-fledged studio where filming takes place and post-production takes place.” Now, the university’s short films are being selected for international film festivals, and graduates are finding their way into advertising. “When I came to work in Mumbai, all of a sudden an ad man came up to me and said, ‘I’m from your college.’ So it’s a great feeling.”
Looking ahead, director Nagarjuna is about 45% in the process of producing his 100th film, which is currently tentatively titled ‘King 100’, although the final title has not been decided yet. Directed by Ra Kartik, the film is, in Nagarjuna’s own words, a “complete commercial script”, with a father-daughter drama at its heart and a rags-to-riches story running through it. Using anti-aging technology, it depicts him from the ages of 25 to 60. The cast includes Tabu, Sushmita Bhatt and Vijayendra, while further additions are still being finalized. He intentionally keeps further details secret in order to reveal greater information. “We don’t want to reveal the script right now. We want to do it in a very big way.”
As for whether this constitutes a new phase in his career, he is completely stepping back in the framework. “There’s no next step. I never thought about it that way.”
