Exclusive! Tovino Thomas: I need to be in shape for Minnal Murali 2

Tovino Thomas and Basil Joseph have reunited after Godha for Malayalam's first superhero film, Minnal Murali. The film is set to be a direct OTT release on Netflix and will stream during the Christmas weekend, that is, December 24, 2021. Ahead of that, the film is getting its premiere at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival on December 16. OTTplay exclusive: got an opportunity to interact with Tovino and Basil, during which the actor-director spoke at length about Minnal Murali. The actor even dropped a major hint about the Minnal Murali sequel and how the film changed his lifestyle. 

Excerpts from the interview below:

Why do you think it took so long for Malayalam to make a superhero movie and what gave you the confidence that it would work?

I don't know why it took so long for a superhero movie. But coming from my perspective, in our industry, our biggest limitation is the budget. Even though there is so much talent, there is so much content, ideas, and everything else in the industry, we are still very far behind in terms of budget. Because we have very limited exposure and visibility among the audience, we have a very small crowd. We are just this very small state. We cannot just push producers to spend so much money and put them in big trouble. 

So that's one of the biggest concerns about making a genre of superheroes. The genre itself says it demands something exaggerated. So you cannot just compromise and make it look like a small film. So we just had to make sure the movie had that justification for the genre. But when it came to the budget, we had to put in that extra effort to justify the genre. Later, we cannot just complain that we didn't have that much budget to compete with Marvel or DC. We have to be clear about that from the very beginning itself that we are going ahead with something very challenging. It's not so usual that this is happening here. So you should be prepared for something big. You have to put in some extra effort to pull this off. So that was one major thought process I had in mind before committing to this movie. If you're doing it, do it right, or else don't do it. That was the biggest choice I had to make in the beginning. So then we had this producer who was very excited and supportive throughout from the beginning like they were big superhero fans themselves and the support they have given made communication so easy. I could easily communicate with them. This movie demands so much of the effects, action sequences, you cannot just go out with some crappy movie, if you are planning to do just do it right or else don't do it. So we have to put in so much funding and everything. But wherever we can push, whichever way we can push, whatever the amount we push, it will be a big budget for a Malayalam industry standard. But it's compared to a Marvel or DC movie. It's 1/100th of the budget they are producing and investing in a movie. So that's the kind of big challenge we got to face, but they were confident. So every technician in the movie had to put an extra effort into making the movie look good, even within our constraints. So we had to work overtime. We had to spend more than 27 hours shooting continuously.

What does it mean to play a superhero in real life? Your obsession with Superman is well known, and after your brave efforts during the Kerala floods, you were hailed by many as a hero in real life too.

Since my childhood, I'm a huge superhero fan, especially Superman. I always wanted to be a superhero. I always wanted to have supernatural powers so that everyone would love me. That's what people do. They just love superheroes. So later, when I grew up, I realized that I could not be a superhero in real life. But when I became an actor, I started getting this unconditional love from people. Partially, my dream was fulfilled, as I always wanted everyone to love me. And later, when Basil offered me this character of a superhero in his next movie, I was very excited about playing this character, because I couldn't be a superhero in real life, at least in real life, and play the superhero. That was really exciting. And from then on, we have been working together on this movie since December 2019, but we started the discussion of this movie in 2018. We have been working a lot. I've been learning a lot of new small skills so that I can perfect the character of this superhero in this movie. And even though our character is a superhero, we never wanted it to look out of place in the world. We wanted it to be a grounded superhero. Our superhero is a superhero who, they say, wears a dhoti and lives in a very small village in Kerala. So, we relied a lot more on practical effects than VFX. We had to train ourselves for that. And yeah, the experience was pretty great. 

You began training for the role in December 2019 and had to stay in shape to maintain continuity till filming concluded earlier this year. How much did the process of playing Jason, aka Minnal Murali, change your lifestyle in the past few years?

So I started working out when I was 15. But it went on for a while, and then it was on and off. I work out for two or three months every year or so. I just keep myself in shape, that's it. But after I started working out for Minnal Murali, I had to maintain my physique throughout the lockdowns. So, then it became a part of my lifestyle. I work out almost every day nowadays, and I have a diet plan. I had to maintain that physique from December 2019 to July 2021. When the movie started, I was not so fit. And the character was not supposed to look like a bodybuilder. He was not supposed to look so fit at the beginning of the movie, and we shot it in chronological order. So there is a subtle body transformation of this character from a normal small-town boy to a superhero who saves the village from the source of his power. He realizes that with more power comes more responsibility. So there is a mental and physical transformation in my character from the beginning to the end. In the beginning, I was a little chubby, but by the end of the movie, I would be lean and fit so that I could fit into the superhero costume; that was the plan. But when the lockdown got extended, I had to maintain my physique like that, and I had a few different looks in the movie, so we made use of the lockdown to keep different looks in the movie. It was supposed to be like the workout plan that I had, but by the end of the shoot with Minnal Murali, it had become a lifestyle. From the time I started working out for the film till now, my life has changed, my lifestyle has changed, and my diet plans have changed. I've become even more disciplined because I'm looking forward to Minnal Murali 2, and for that, I need to be in shape.

This year, you already had Kala and Kaanekkaane - that had you essaying characters of various shades. In that regard, how different is your character in this film?

Kala is not at all similar to Kaanekkaane and Minnal Murali is the direct opposite of what you saw in both films. In Kala, my character was not at all funny, and even in Kaanekkaane. In Minnal Murali, you can see more of my humorous side. I have a lot of action sequences, which is very different from what I did in Kala. This one is a properly choreographed superhero fight. The movie itself is very different, so my character is also different; that's it. You will see a different side of me. 

Your strength has been comedy, and how much does it lend to Minnal Murali?

It's not an action-comedy, but there are some flavours of comedy in it. From the beginning, the narrative was to include comedy, but we have enough shades of drama and some shades of horror, mystery, and thriller. It's not a complete comedy movie. We cannot make a comedy superhero movie. As the Malayalam film industry is very new to the genre, we cannot just make a comedy movie just like that. We must be familiar with each superhero genre and its template. First of all, the genre must be established very properly here. Then we can experiment with it later, by spoofing or making fun of the genre, like in Deadpool. We have followed the superhero template that has characters and structure in the screenplay. At some point, after we are playing around just with comedy for half an hour or something, it will die off. You need something serious to make you go forward with the story, especially when it is happening in a fantasy village. There should be some conflicts in the village because there is nothing a superhero can do in the village. That's where the drama comes into the movie. We had to balance both. We had to tell the narrative with a mix of comedy and drama altogether.