Kabzaa: I didn’t see the showreel; Chandru showed me to everyone - the Kiccha Sudeep roast of R Chandru

Kiccha Sudeep was in high spirits on Thursday morning, as he reached Mumbai as part of the promotional tour of Kabzaa. Sudeep plays a pivotal cameo in the film, as police officer Bhargava Bakshi. As the film’s leading man Upendra explained how he worked on Kabzaa over four years without complaining, even though Chandru would sometimes ask him to report in the morning and keep him waiting through the day, he said that all was usually forgiven when the filmmaker showed him a showreel of the footage that had been shot. A visually-pleasing, stylistically shot segment, this showreel always floored him, said Upendra, and then threw the question to Sudeep, if he agreed to do the role based on the same footage. The actor pounced on this opportunity and said, “No, he didn’t show me the showreel, he showed me to the everyone,” in reference to the fact that Sudeep has become one of the major talking points of the film, even though he’s only done a cameo.

On a similarly jocular note, Sudeep decided to play translator for Chandru, who spoke at length in Kannada about Kabzaa being the result of team work, among others. And his paraphrased translation was that the filmmaker asked everyone gathered to learn Kannada soon. Earlier, when Shriya Saran was speaking about Chandru was often in tears during his script narration, especially certain emotional scenes, she asked Sudeep if the same happened to him and he didn’t bat an eyelid before saying, “No, he cried only when he had to pay me.”

Kabzaa will be Sudeep’s first release since Vikrant Rona. The actor is yet to announce his next solo-hero venture, although, during the promotions of Vikrant Rona he had said that he was looking at collaborating with its director, Anup Bhandari again. There was also buzz about a film with Maanaadu maker Venkat Prabhu an going by Anup’s latest that he will need a few more months in pre-production to start Billa Ranga Baasha, #Kiccha46 will likely be with the former.