Exclusive! Prithviraj on Aadujeevitham: It’s tough for me, and given a choice I wouldn’t do it again

The past two years, Prithviraj Sukumaran’s personal and professional life revolves around the planned schedules of Aadujeevitham, which have been uncertain due to the pandemic restrictions. While the film finally resumed earlier this month in Algeria after almost two years, the task of seeing it through has been tough for the actor, as he tells OTTplay about getting into the headspace of Najeeb in the Blessy directorial.

For Prithviraj, the movie has been in the making for almost four years now, with him shooting the early portions of the film that has him in a bulky avatar, in 2018. Since then, he has shed weight to essay the sequences that have the protagonist as an emaciated goat-herder in Saudi Arabia.

His upcoming release Jana Gana Mana too was shot over one and a half years due to the pandemic. Ask him how challenging it is for him to get back into the intense characters when there are breaks that he doesn’t have any control over and Prithviraj explains, “Frankly, it is tough and it’s not something that I enjoy. I am not used to having so many breaks between a film because of how Malayalam industry traditionally works and the way I do my films.”

The actor says that when he starts working on a film, he likes to see it through to the end and then begin his next movie. “But because of the size of these two films and what has happened across the world over the past couple of years, we are in this scenario. And it’s actually very tough for me – physically and mentally. Given a choice, I wouldn’t do it again,” he says.

Prithviraj also says that it was even more difficult for Aadujeevitham as he had to get into the mind space of Najeeb once again, before resuming the shoot in Algeria. “With Aadujeevitham, it’s even tougher because of the character and how much detailing we are planning to give the film. I had taken a month’s break to escape and zone out from cinema, before joining the movie,” he says.

The team is expected to move from Algeria to Jordan next month and wrap up its shoot by June.

Also read: Exclusive! Prithviraj: Jana Gana Mana fulfils its full potential only if it is watched with a community