Dhanush down the ages: From ‘Thulluvadho Ilamai’ to ‘Naane Varuvean’

Though 20 years have passed since he made his Kollywood debut, it's clear that Dhanush is not taking his stardom for granted. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

In the summer of 2002, just after we had finished our 11th standard exams, a group of us went to watch Thulluvadho Ilamai at Chennai’s Udhayam theatre. It was an A-rated film and we considered it to be a rite of passage, a heady step into adulthood (the title, after all, translates to ‘exuberance of youth’). The film’s hero was a teenage boy, not much older than us. Dark-skinned and scrawny, his first dialogue to the camera – uttered when looking at himself in the mirror – was: “Thoo, moonjiya paaru!” (Yuck, look at this face!).

Thulluvadho Ilamai revolves around six adolescents who are dealing with the angst of growing up in dysfunctional families. It was full of rough edges, but the film spoke to us, and many more young people who steadily filled the theatres and turned it into a surprise sleeper hit. Despite this, nobody thought the teenage boy had a career in the film industry as a leading man.

Twenty years later, he made his Hollywood debut with The Gray Man, an action thriller directed by the Russo Brothers.

Strictly speaking, Dhanush is a ‘nepo kid’. His father is director Kasthuri Raja who lent his name for Thulluvadho Ilamai. In reality, the film was directed by his brother Selvaraghavan. At the time, the family decided to go with the established director’s name for trade reasons. Dhanush reportedly wanted to study hotel management and become a chef, and it was Selvaraghavan who pushed him into cinema. His birth name was Venkatesh Prabhu, but the actor decided to name himself ‘Dhanush’ after the name of the covert operation in the 1995 Kamal Haasan thriller Kuruthipunal.

When Dhanush made his debut, the reigning superstars of the Tamil film industry – Rajinikanth and Kamal Haasan – were still the badshahs of the box-office, their stardom unaffected by the occasional flop. The next generation of male stars – Ajith, Vijay, Vikram and Suriya – who had made their debut in the '90s, were steadily establishing themselves with romantic dramas and action films. Despite the fact that he had a foothold in the industry because of his father, this was a crowded and extremely competitive space for Dhanush to enter. If he imitated his predecessors, he was sure to fail; he had to carve out his own space and stand out.

He did this by choosing films in which he was the underdog, an unlikely hero whose masculinity wasn’t communicated through muscle but attitude. In his second film Kadhal Kondein (2003), which was also directed by Selvaraghavan, Dhanush played Vinoth, a mentally disturbed orphan who becomes obsessed with his female classmate. The film ended with Vinoth’s death, but it marked Dhanush’s rise in the eyes of the youth. The song ‘Devathayai Kanden’ (composed by Yuvan Shankar Raja) became something of an anthem for young men who believed they’d been unfairly friend-zoned despite their ‘sincere’ romantic feelings towards a girl.

While the stars who came before him were largely playing the righteous hero who didn’t have to try too hard to get the girl, Dhanush’s films became an outlet for many young men who lacked opportunities to interact with fair-skinned, privileged women who were dangled as the ultimate ‘prize’ in Tamil films. Even before he made his debut, the industry had a long history of justifying violence against women as romance, starting with its first superstar MGR.

In Dhanush’s films, however, the messaging was overt. In the 2009 masala film Padikkadhavan, for instance, he incessantly stalks Gayathri, played by Tamannaah. When she tells him that she can’t stand the sight of him, he says, “Boys like me will not appeal to you instantly. We will appeal to you as you keep seeing us. You girls dream in the range of Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan. But only 2 percent of boys have the good looks of Shah Rukh Khan and Salman Khan. The rest of us form the remaining 98 percent. We are the majority.”

Such dialogues became his punch lines, and helped him build mass appeal. He also invented the ‘soup song’ genre – a breakup song sung by a man who has been rejected by the woman he loves. The lines were often misogynistic, as in the infamous ‘Kadhal En Kadhal’ song from Mayakkam Enna (2011) which had lines like “Adida avala, udhaida avala, viduda avala, thevaye illa” (Beat her, kick her, leave her, you don’t need her). His Hindi debut film Ranjhaana (2013) with Sonam Kapoor Ahuja, too, has been criticised for romanticising stalking. It was not until 2016, when a young techie named Swathi was allegedly murdered by her stalker, that the Tamil film industry began to change its problematic representations of romance in the face of criticism from the public and the media.

Still, it would be a mistake to box Dhanush’s appeal to his misogynistic dialogues. He was (and is) a terrific dancer, and his fan following exploded in theatres whenever he set the dance floor on fire. Watch his wiry, vibrating frame in ‘Manmatha Rasa’ from his third film Thiruda Thirudi (2003)  for a sample. Legend has it that the actor was running a high fever when this song that would put the Energizer Bunny to shame, was shot.

With hits like Polladhavan (2007) and Yaaradi Nee Mohini (2008), Dhanush proved that he was here to stay. He had the rare ability to look vulnerable on screen, and was able to melt into any role given to him despite his growing stardom. He didn’t seem to care about crafting any particular image for himself. In Pudhupettai (2006), for instance, he played a ruthless gangster who lives the thug life king size. The film was an average grosser at the box-office – possibly due to the many violent scenes it had – but is considered to be among Dhanush’s best performances till date.

In 2010 came Aadukalam with Vetrimaaran – Dhanush played Karuppu, a young man who becomes embroiled in the politics surrounding the local sport of cockfighting. He won the National Award for Best Actor for the film.

Dhanush would go on to collaborate with Vetrimaaran in the critically acclaimed Vada Chennai (2018) and Asuran (2019). While the first is a gangster film set in North Madras, the second is about the land rights of Dalits and is based on Poomani’s novel Vekkai. Both films had Dhanush playing different ages through his character arc, making him one of the few actors of his generation to still look convincing as a 20-year-old. He also picked up his second National Award for Best Actor for Asuran.

Dhanush set up his production company Wunderbar Films with his then wife Aishwarya Rajinikanth in 2010. Vellaiilla Pattadhari (2014), directed by Velraj and starring Dhanush with Amala Paul, is among the most successful of the company’s productions. The film, popularly known as VIP, was about an educated but unemployed youth and greatly appealed to young people who were in a similar phase in life. The sequel, which came out in 2017, had Bollywood actor Kajol playing the antagonist.

Wunderbar has also produced disruptive films like Manikandan’s Kaaka Muttai (2015), Vetrimaaran’s Visaranai (2016, India’s official entry for the Academy Awards) and Pa Ranjith’s Kaala (2018). The first two fetched him the National Awards as producer (Best Children’s Film and Best Feature Film in Tamil).

When Dhanush made his directorial debut in 2017, it was with the surprising Pa Paandi. Surprising because the film is about the romance between an elderly stunt master and his long-lost love – beautifully played by Raj Kiran and Revathi, respectively. Nuanced and often funny, the film became a hit. While as an actor he mostly catered to the youth, as a director, the audience got to see how he had matured in cinema over the years.

However, Dhanush’s experiments outside Tamil cinema haven’t been that successful. After Raanjhanaa (which was a hit), he did Shamitabh (2015) with Amitabh Bachchan and Atrangi Re (2021) with Sara Ali Khan. Though he is acknowledged as a great actor across the country, the Hindi audience is yet to warm up to him – not in the least because his film choices have been disappointing.

More importantly, while the Russo Brothers may have referred to Dhanush as their “sexy Tamil friend”, Bollywood is a lot less diverse and inclusive than the southern industries. Dhanush has been unable to get past Bollywood’s rigid barrier for how a leading man ought to look. His adventure comedy with Canadian director Ken Scott – The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an IKEA Wardrobe –  in which he played a Hindi-speaking man from Mumbai also fared poorly at the box-office.

Still, Dhanush has managed to achieve pan-Indian appeal through music. Two songs co-written and sung by him – ‘Why this Kolaveri di’ and ‘Rowdy Baby’ (also featuring the wonderful Sai Pallavi) – broke several YouTube records when they premiered.

It’s clear that though 20 years have passed since he made his debut, Dhanush is not taking his stardom for granted. If he played the bloodthirsty avenging hero in Mari Selvaraj’s hard-hitting anti-caste film Karnan in 2021, he played a food delivery boy who avoids fights at any cost in Mithran Jawahar’s romcom Thiruchitrambalam in 2022. The romcom, released at a time when producers are worried about the lack of footfalls in theatres, has earned more than Rs 100 crore. And while his filmography has almost always been male-centric, Thiruchitrambalam had a near equal role for Nithya Menen.

This week, his psychological thriller Naane Varuvean hit theatres a day before Mani Ratnam’s magnum opus, Ponniyin Selvan. Directed by his brother Selvaraghavan who is also acting in it, Naane Varuvean is taking a big risk with the box-office clash. It remains to be seen if the film will come out on top – but what is indisputable is that the boy who once smirked at the sight of his own face in the mirror is now a star who is confident of his place in the industry.