Kerala’s rising star Anaswara Rajan calls herself an accidental actor

Anaswara Rajan, Kerala's rising star, discusses her journey in the film industry and her aspirations for future roles.

Anaswara Rajan’s smile is worth a million bucks, the actor’s face breaks into that smile when I congratulate her on the third release of the year (it is only the second week of February yet!) and the tremendous success of Rekhachitram. “The releases just happened one after the other. These were the films that I worked on last year…it just happened that way,” she says. We are, of course, talking about Painkili, her film after Rekhachitram and Ennu Swantham Punyalan. 

With perfect hair, which the stylist touches up, dressed in a black silk shirt with red flowers and black trousers, Anaswara looks every bit the film star.

Anaswara calls her role in Painkili, the closest to how she is as a person — “slightly weird, ebullient and I can be very funny. The meter of all the characters is high, it is like everyone is on something high-inducing. Everything is over the top! It was a lot of fun,” says the 22 year old. It might remind you of the kind of films we would have watched before, “but told in a new way.”  

Sreejith Babu, the director, did not restrict the actors in any way, she adds. Though the film has met with mixed reviews, Anaswara impresses as the excitable, prone-to-impulsiveness Shiba Baby. Shiba is the kind of character she had been wanting to play, “it [the character] is free, I can do whatever I want]. It is a bit like myself… I have never played a character like myself.”  

The actor made her debut in the 2017 film Udaharanam Sujatha, as Athira Krishna, the teenage daughter of a domestic worker Sujatha (Manju Warrier). She was in Class VIII at the time. 

Calling herself an accidental actor, Anaswara says that acting was a distant dream for her. “I am from a village in Kannur. Acting and cinema were another world for me,” she says. However she was into street plays and mono acting while in school. When a friend told her about an audition call for Udaharanam Sujatha, she attended it and got the role. She made an impression as the petulant teenager who resents her mother studying in the same class as her in the Malayalam remake of the Hindi film Nil Battey Sannata.  

After the film was done, she was back at home, in Kannur, back to school until a couple of years later when Thanneermathan Dinangal happened. As Keerthy, the ‘crush’ of 11the grader Jaison (Mathew Thomas), in the Gireesh AD film, she won many young hearts in Kerala. She went to act in Gireesh’s next, Super Sharanya, which was another praiseworthy performance. Following that, she did films such as Vaanku, Vishudha Mejo, Pranaya Vilasam, Thugs including a couple of Tamil and a Hindi film too … but her breakout role and film was yet to be.