Unni Mukundan interview: On how his role in ‘Jai Ganesh’ was transformative personally and professionally

Unni Mukundan's transformative role in Jai Ganesh challenges perceptions of disability in a gripping mystery thriller.

When Unni Mukundan calls Jai Ganesh ‘a gem’, his best film yet,he does not say it lightly. “You don’t normally get films that change you as an individual. This film transformed me personally and professionally,” says the actor over the phone. Jai Ganesh, directed by Ranjith Sankar hit theatres today.  

Essaying the wheelchair-bound hero Ganesh Gangadharan opened Unni’s eyes to the lives the disabled lead in “cities engineered for the abled. Somehow, we don’t ‘see’ the disabled people among us. This is not a random film. It changed me as a man.” The thriller gave him a new perspective on life. “Those of us who are not dealing with these physical challenges complain about the slightest thing that does not go our way. And then we have disabled people fighting for the basics.” 

He did not want to showcase a ‘crippled hero’ for the sake of it and Ranjith Sankar assured him it would not be so. “The representation would be such that it would give the audience, especially the disabled, goosebumps. For me it was a role, but think of it from the perspective of, the reality of someone who has to spend his entire life in a wheelchair.” Ganesh is a hero, a man with agency over his narrative who does not seek sympathy. “And don’t we all like heroes? This film is not intended to garner sympathy but to show that they are also heroes.”  

It has been a year-and-a-half since his biggest hit, Malikapuram, was released. Its unprecedented success opened his eyes to a section of the audience partial to ‘family-friendly films’. “Malikapuram had the support of family audiences, the kind that likes kid- friendly films. And when Ranjith came to me with this story, I loved it!” He is confident it will click with his niche audience.

In fact, he liked it so much that he came on board as a producer. Ranjith Sankar’s Dreams N Beyond and Unni Mukundan Films are the producers. Unni is also the distributor of the film. He grew so close to the project that he felt, while the film was being edited, that a ‘part of my life’ was being cut away. 

“We reworked the draft (of the script) 28 or 29 times till it achieved its current form. For me to have read all those times would give one an idea of how motivated I would have had to be. I wanted to understand the character’s dynamic. The interactions with Ranjith led me to gain an appreciation for him as a writer as well,” he adds.    

One of the reasons Ranjith picked him was because “I looked the part, because of my upper body strength — my shoulders and my arms, to look the part of someone who uses a wheelchair who constantly has to hoist himself in and out of it and rely on their upper body for any kind of movement.”