Chinnu Nair was then three and on a stage in Tanzania. She was a very imaginative child and someone had put her up there to act in a play. Three years later, she was on that stage again, as a playwright! All of six years, she was directing her friends to play Aladdin, the book she read the day before. Six more years later, the family packed their bags and came back to Kerala, where Chinnu joined a girls’ school and went through her high school quietly.
When she was in Plus II in the Carmel School, her principal Sr. Renita encouraged her and she was back to her active self. She soon engaged in arts and sports and from school plays, she graduated to college plays. Then Chinnu joined for M. Phil in Theatre and Performing Arts. And while on stage for a Shakespearean play, the casting director of Anuraga Karikkin Vellam noticed her, called her for an audition and Chinnu became Jaslene or Jassu.
When I went for the audition in Kochi, I couldn't figure out who the director was. Everyone was young and around the same age,” Chinnu recalls. Coincidentally, she had also got a friend to answer a casting call for the same film. But then casting director Ajai Rahul saw her as Viola/Cesario in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and felt she had the body and the I-don't-care attitude of Jassu’s character. “I had put on weight after having thyroid problems but then that's what got me the role.”
Chinnu had earlier acted in a festival film called Shakespeare. “And before that, when I was 21, I gambled everything I had on a movie I tried to make with youngsters who were ready to work for free. But the budget was overshot and we had to stop midway.” This was the time her parents had wanted her to pursue civil service, while she wished to go to the Pune Film Institute.
“It was listening to the Oscar Speech of Charlize Theron for her performance in Monster, and watching the Tom Hanks film Cast Away, that made me want to seriously look at cinema.” She is right now in the middle of both, her work in Anuraga Karikkin Vellam bringing her appreciation from all quarters, and also passing the civil service exams in reserve list. “My growing-up ambitions have kept changing from wanting to be a poet to a soldier to a civil servant but there has always been this one constant dream — to win an Oscar one day. That's the kind of passion I have for cinema.”
