Keeping It Short : Naveen Chandra

Actor Naveen Chandra is a now a leading man in Tamil, thanks to Arun Mohan’s Sarabham which released last Friday. But he tells us he’d much rather be a ‘dream boy’ than anything else. His logic is quite simple: every actor begins, Chandra shrugs coolly, “by being a favourite with the ladies.” But the guys will like me too, he suddenly bursts forth, startling us, “I’m no threat to their women, really.”

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I speak accented Tamil because… I’m a Tamil boy but I was brought up in Hyderabad. I know and can speak a lot of languages so I guess something to do with that too.

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Everybody thinks Salony Luthra… looks like this Shahrukh Khan heroine, but not me. She looks more like Angelina Jolie to me. Same shoulders, same face and they even walk the same way.

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I take my thrills… wherever I can. I got to do a lot of crazy stuff during Sarabham. We shot on top of a speeding van, they dangled me from the fourteenth floor of a building and so on. It was like going on an adventure holiday!

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The toughest scene from Sarabham…has to be for the ‘Bodhaiyil Pathai Marum’ song. We shot on top of a speeding van with nothing to hold onto. A super heavy body mount camera was strapped onto me.

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Director Arun Mohan is a paavam fellow…he had to complete Sarabham in thirty days and there was this extraordinary amount of pressure on all of us. But, there was more at stake for him. He didn’t want to waste time losing his cool when we made mistakes.

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Acting is not easy....it’s a lot of work. Everytime I do an intense scene, I give a little of myself away. It’s easy to be obvious about everything – I can shout, laugh and cry just like that and you can call me a great actor. But the subtle stuff takes a lot out of an actor, but is lost on the audience.

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And finally Naveen can do....pretty much everything. I know eight languages, do my own stunts, and learnt every aspect of filmmaking before I entered the industry.