With top-grossing movies and experimental roles, Malayalam superstar Mammootty has managed to stay relevant

Mammootty, 71, has been acting for over five decades, a period long enough for a celebrity in a culture of incredible flux to fade into obscurity. However, not only has he endured the test of time, he is currently in one of the most exciting phases of his career. His recent films are a mix of mainstream entertainers and smaller auteurist projects. In January this year, he delivered a terrific performance in Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam as James, a Malayali man who metamorphoses one afternoon into a stranger and begins to live a life hitherto unknown to him in a Tamil Nadu border village. With around 420 films in six different languages, Mammootty’s filmography towers over his Southern contemporaries Mohanlal, Rajinikanth and Chiranjeevi. He has aged gracefully on the screen and seems unruffled by the transformations in cinema and audience tastes in recent years.

“There are two Mammoottys,” says veteran filmmaker Sathyan Anthikkad. “One corporeal, whom we see and assume to know, and the other, a spectre shadowing the former, closely observing him. The superstar is a carefully crafted project designed by a relentless self-critic.”

You might sense traces of this quality scattered throughout his public appearances, where he eloquently reflects on his craft and the world around him. He once admitted to being deeply embarrassed by his performances in early films. “I realised everything I knew about acting was folly,” he wrote in his memoir  Chamayangal (2011). 

At film promotion events, he steers all conversation towards the art and technology of cinema. “It is not make-believe,” he interrupted a journalist in an interview last May, following the release of Puzhu. “An actor should believe.” To become a character is to enter the mould of an entire life lived by another person, he said, before elaborating on how he decided that Raghavan in Munnariyippu (2014) would not swing his arms.

Mammootty, 71, has been acting for over five decades, a period long enough for a celebrity in a culture of incredible flux to fade into obscurity. However, not only has he endured the test of time, he is currently in one of the most exciting phases of his career.

His recent films are a mix of mainstream entertainers and smaller auteurist projects. In January this year, he delivered a terrific performance in Lijo Jose Pellissery’s Nanpakal Nerathu Mayakkam as James, a Malayali man who metamorphoses one afternoon into a stranger and begins to live a life hitherto unknown to him in a Tamil Nadu border village. 

Mammootty delves into the core of this transformation and richly animates the oneiric melding of the two characters. The film was produced by him under his newly launched banner, Mammootty Kampany, and distributed by his son, Dulquer Salmaan, who is one of the most bankable young stars in South India today.

Last year, he headlined two top-grossing Malayalam movies — Bheeshma Parvam, an ersatz  Godfather directed by Amal Neerad, in which he starred as the patriarch of a Christian family in Fort Kochi, and Rorschach, a revenge-drama by Nissam Basheer.