With Mammooty’s well-known age defying good looks, it is a hard task to grab attention in the looks and style department when you are pitted against him. But many teenyboppers who came out after watching the recent Mammooty-starrer Masterpiece were interested in the name of the tall and good looking actor who played the villain— Roshan Cherian. Some of the audience would recall the same face as the villainous PT master in the hit film Ann Mariya Kalippilanu, which has now become John Kaippallil’s calling card. Incidentally, John has the good fortune of seeing two of his releases happening simultaneously. He plays the character Mahesh Shetty in Aadu2, which is raking in the moolah at the box office.
A look at John’s roles and what is common is that he is almost getting typecast in the antagonist slot. Not that John has any aversion to playing a villain. He jests, “I get called to play only the antagonist roles. Don’t know if it is because of my looks.” Quips aside, John states, “An antagonist stays in the mind of the audience and is as important as the hero. But, yes, the typecasting factor is there, in that the moment people see me they think ‘villain’. Though I am trying to buck the trend, I do not mind playing villain roles. If a character convinces me, I will do it irrespective of it being positive or negative!”
While he would not mind repeating his villainous acts, what he strives to see is that the roles not be of the similar kind. The villain Mahesh of Aadu 2 is again a departure from Roshan in his mannerisms, clothes and acting style. He also had a bit of buffoonery to do in Aadu 2, which was a first for him. “Instead of looking menacing, I got a chance to do some light-hearted scenes.”
Coming to Masterpiece, it was director Ajai Vasudev who contacted John and informed him of a role in the Mammootty-starrer and then narrated the basic storyline to him. He says, “I understood that my character was a prominent one with shades of good and bad and the chance to act with Mammooty and other technicians like Ajai and Udayan chettan was too good to let pass by.”
He cherishes the experience of acting alongside Mammooty and admits to being a bit nervous around the superstar at first. “But Mammukka does not have any airs about him. What astounded me is that he is updated about everything technology-wise and with everybody on the sets. I was under the impression that he would not have heard of me but he knew every detail of not only me but of all his other co-stars. I found him to be very genuine and it was huge learning experience for me,” he gushes.
John does have some projects in the pipeline but does not want to reveal too much. He is in talks for a Kollywood film and you guessed right — he plays a villain again.
