Rag Mayur on ‘Modern Love Hyderabad’: When I was being offered similar roles, Venkatesh Maha looked at me differently

After the Telugu indie ‘Cinema Bandi’, actor Rag Mayur counts on ‘Modern Love Hyderabad’ to open new doors in the film industry

“It takes one Friday to make people notice you. Cinema Bandi got me that recognition, though the film had an OTT release instead of a theatrical one as originally planned,” says actor Rag Mayur. The 2021 Telugu comedy directed by Praveen Kandregula starred Mayur as barber Maridesh Babu, an ignorant rural youngster who aspires to be a star. A year after Cinema Bandi, Mayur portrays an urban character in the anthology series Modern Love Hyderabad, streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

Mayur features in the story titled Finding your Penguin directed by Venkatesh Maha, starring Komalee Prasad in the lead. Finding your Penguin is an atypical story of a young woman, a microbiologist, who equates her search for the ideal man to the dating patterns of animals. A series of fun encounters follow and one of the men she meets is Tarun, the character played by Mayur, whom she later describes as too boring and perfect, like a typical Telugu film hero!

Acting in the short story, Mayur recalls, was an experience so different from that of Cinema Bandi. “There used to be scope for improvisations on the sets of Cinema Bandi, whereas Maha likes to plan to the minute detail.” 

A five-day workshop introduced Mayur to Maha’s working style: “His attention to detail was spellbinding. He was very clear about each character’s body language and diction. Beyond that, he even looked into things such as the mobile phone covers of the heroine’s friends. The workshop helped me understand my character, Tarun, better.”

Post Cinema Bandi, Mayur says he was flooded with similar rural comedies and chose to wait till he got something different: “It was frustrating but I knew I had to wait it out. Once you get typecast, it can get extremely tough to break free. Luckily, Maha looked at me differently and suggested my name for the anthology. I was also lucky to be selected without an audition.”

Completing his engineering from Osmania University, Mayur pursued a master’s programme in the United States. However, like many other computer science engineering graduates in Hyderabad, his interest in cinema got the better of him and after he returned to India and took up a job in Bengaluru, he enrolled in theatre workshops to learn acting and direction: “Whatever I know about acting today, I owe it to my experience with Little Theatre in Bengaluru and Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art Research at Auroville, Pondicherry. It opened up my perspectives and helped me not to confine myself to a box.” 

Mayur worked with director Tharun Bhascker for an ad film and a “blink-and-miss” part in director Vivek Athreya’s debut film, Mental Madhilo. Post Modern Love Hyderabad, he is looking forward to a web series he has completed, and a new feature film he has signed, the details of which are to be announced formally by the respective production houses: “So far my life can be divided into before and after Cinema Bandi. It has taken time to get noticed, but I am confident that more interesting work will come my way. I want to try and be like Rajkummar Rao, enacting a variety of characters.”