Pawan Kalyan set to don greasepaint again, to star in Telugu remake of 'Pink'

After a disastrous tryst with electoral politics, Telugu film star Pawan Kalyan is all set to return to the celluloid world. The social media platforms are abuzz with excitement over the development.

Ironically, Power Star, as the 47-year-old actor is popularly known, had made it clear during the election campaigning that he would not return to films. He is the younger brother of megastar of Telugu cinema, Chiranjeevi, who too had a similar setback in politics.

Even after drawing a blank in the simultaneous elections to the Lok Sabha and Andhra Pradesh Assembly in April, the Jana Sena Party supremo had assured his party cadre that he would remain in active politics.

Maverick star

Known for his maverick and mercurial ways with unclear motives, Pawan Kalyan appears to have changed his mind and is now all set to don the greasepaint once again.

He will play the lead in the Telugu remake of critically-acclaimed Hindi film Pink starring Amitabh Bachchan. Producer Boney Kapoor, who forayed into Tamil industry with the remake of Pink, Nerkonda Paarvai with Ajith Kumar, is also producing the Telugu version.

The film will be jointly produced by Dil Raju and Kapoor. Sriram Venu will be directing the movie and Trivikram Srinivas, the popular script writer-director, will pen the dialogues. The film, which is tentatively titled PSPK 20, is expected to go on floors by the end of this year.

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Sources close to the mega star’s family say, Pawan Kalyan has been listening to scripts for some time now and will pick the films with social message, keeping with his political image. The remake of Pink puts him in the role of champion of women’s rights.

Recently, he had lent his voice to elder brother Chiranjeevi’s Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy, a period film set in the 1840s. Ever since his nephew and Chiranjeevi’s actor-son Ram Charan dropped hints that he would be more than willing to produce a Pawan-starrer, there has been excitement among his fans.

Unconventional career

Having made his debut in 1996 with Akkada Ammayi, Ikkada Abbayi, Pawan has a string of hits and awards under his belt.

Known for his penchant for an unconventional style of film making, he has produced and directed a couple of movies. He was listed by Forbes among the top 100 Indian celebrities while he was the most searched Indian personality on Google in 2014 when he had launched Jana Sena Party.

There is a massive army of his fans, who call themselves “Pawan Sena” and turn into online warriors to defend their hero from the mocking memes and spoofs on the actor. He has 3.52 million followers on twitter but follows only one person — Amitabh Bachchan.

For someone who had five consecutive mega-hits that earned him fame, fortune, and fans, Pawan comes across as a brooding and lonely person yearning for some higher purpose in life.

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“Sometimes, I used to feel completely out of place in the movies. I used to wonder why I am running around the trees, romancing heroines and dancing. Somehow, I was not into it. I always used to slip into my shell of introspection,” the actor had once said during a long conversation with this correspondent.

Behind the veneer of glamour and stardom, Pawan remains a restless man awe-struck by the history of revolutions and struggling to find an identity of his own and an ideology of his own.

Known for his volatile mood swings and penchant for guns and revolvers, Pawan worships Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara. At the same time, he worships cows at his Gowshala near Vijayawada. He recently posted on his social media page the pictures of him feeding the cows at the Gowshala.

Disastrous show

His Jana Sena Party bombed at the ballot box office in Andhra Pradesh. Such was the scale of its drubbing on its electoral debut that the actor himself lost both the assembly seats he contested in the Kapu community dominated the coastal region — Gajuwaka and Bheemavaram – while the party candidates lost deposits in a majority of the constituencies.

Despite enjoying massive following among the youth, particularly belonging to the numerically strong and influential Kapu community, he failed to convert his star appeal into votes due to lack of a cohesive political strategy, organisational structure, and credible agenda.