Steep rise to stardom

A number of young actors have stormed Mollywood in the recent times and many of them have been able to sustain themselves thanks to their talent and acceptance by the audience.

Fahadh Faasil, one among this group, has been steadily working his way up winning both commercial acclaim and box-office success. Fahadh has come up on his own steam, not leveraging on his father Fazil’s status as an acclaimed producer/director. 

Fazil Sr did introduce his son to films when he cast him in Kaiyethum Doorathu. But after the film fell flat at the box-office, the filmmaker wisely stepped aside to let his son find his own way. Fahadh, however, returned to films only eight years later in 2010. This time, it was director Ranjith who conceived a role for him in the multi-star cast film Kerala Café, and after the film became a hit, the actor was flooded with offers. With a shrewd father to guide him, Fahadh could select roles that went beyond the stereotype. A number of films like Pramani, Cocktail and Tournament met with varying degrees of success at the box-office. 

A league of his own 

Fahadh’s career really got a shot in the arm when he played the head of a construction firm in debutant Sameer Thahir’s film Chappa Kurishu. A fast-paced thriller, the film gave him plenty of scope to exhibit his talent and also landed him in a bit of controversy for his liplock with the leading lady Remya Nambeesan. The movies that came later enabled him to steal a march over his contemporaries and Fahadh soon became a hot favourite with directors and producers alike. Ever on the lookout for fresh themes, Fahadh made an exception with the psycho-thriller, Akam, directed by Usha Shalini Nair. The film had Fahadh in the role of an architect who suspects that his wife is a ghost. 

Among his later day films, Ashiq Abu’s 22 Female Kottayam and the Lal Jose-directed Diamond Necklace need a special mention. In Abu’s film, Fahadh played a pimp and he did it with a lot of conviction. Diamond Necklace, set in the Gulf, had Fahadh as an oncologist in a hospital, and explored his relationship with three women whom he comes across. Both the films played key roles in helping Fahadh move up in the star ratings but perhaps the film that really extracted a lot out of him was Shyamprasad’s Artist, which was based on a novel, Dreams in Prussian Blue. He essayed the role of an egoist Christian painter in a live-in relationship with a nubile Brahmin girl. In the latter part of the film, the character loses his eyesight and how he copes with the sea of darkness surrounding him formed the film’s crux. 

Experiments

Fahadh also reaped rich dividends from films like North 24 Kaatham, where he was cast as an IT professional travelling from Kochi to Trivandrum with the film etching the incidents on the way. Fahadh, who had earlier won the Kerala State Award for Artist and the Second Best Actor for Akam and Chappa Kurishu, won the best actor award for North 24 Kaatham. Incidentally, the film also won the National Award for the Best Malayalam film of the year. 

Currently, Fahadh has a number of films in various stages of production. One film that took the box-office by storm recently was Bangalore Days directed by scriptwriter director Anjali Menon where Fahadh acted with Dulquer Salman and Nivin Pauly. Apart from his own production Iyobinte Pustakam, in which he plays the lead. 

Fahadh also has Vambathi where he will be seen in a deglamourised role, Sivaganga Cinema Factory directed by Babu Janardhanan and Money Rathnam directed by Santhosh Nair. A marked feature of the actor’s career so far has been his ability to work on his characters and come up to the expectations of the script and the director. Whether he will emulate his father Fazil, who has had an illustrious innings as a director, by stepping behind the camera, is yet to be seen.