WATCH | Suzhal The Vortex S2: Long format helps us play with characters well, says Pushkar-Gayatri
The creators of Suzhal The Vortex: Season 2-- Pushkar-Gayatri were in DT Next office recently to talk about the show that took the audience by storm with its first season
L to R: Pushkar-Gayatri, still of Kathir and Lal, from Suzhal season 2
CHENNAI: The trailer of the second season released on February 19 and was an instant hit. With Suzhal The Vortex: Season 2 streaming from Thursday midnight, a few binge watchers have planned it as a repeated watch over the weekend. “The second season has eight suspects-- all young women with no connection to one another. That was the juggling act we had to do. Apart from Sakkarai (Kathir) and Nandhini (Aishwarya Rajesh), we have quite a few new characters. Lal sir is playing a crucial role, Manjima Mohan is back with Suzhal 2 and then there is Saravanan in another important character. There is a new dimension to his role,” said Pushkar-Gayatri, who were in our office to promote the series.
With as many as a dozen characters in the second season, the director duo added that they needed to love all their characters equally during the process of writing as well as during the casting. Pushkar-Gayatri said, “This is one of the reasons why we love writing for the longer format of the medium. In film, you cannot provide depth with so many characters around in the limited time. But shows have a scope and play with them well. There are as many as eight female characters. To find the right cast was a huge process. All eight characters have eight different personalities. It took us six months to finalise them. Also, we have made them larger-than-life characters. Women-centric stories are internalised in the sense, they have predominantly discussed their coming-of-age, and success stories. In our stories, we ensure that they stand up to the stories of men. How will they handle an issue that comes from external factors? We have dealt with that by giving them a mass-u, gethu dimension, as the audience would call it.
As we talked about grey shades, there was a huge smile on Pushkar-Gayatri’s face. The duo has been successful in adding a touch of greyness to most of their characters and their quest for redemption. “That is what is the understanding of human life. Nobody is completely good or completely bad. Also, the mythology factor around Suzhal- the story takes place around the temple festival and the procession. In Indian mythology there is no good guy or a bad guy. In Suzhal 2, our moment of grey and its discovery will pan out in the final moment of the last episode,” they tell us.
Suzhal has broken the stereotype for Kathir, who is known for his boy-next-door character. Even in Pushkar-Gayatri’s Vikram Vedha, the writing is such that Kathir’s character Pulli was branded as ‘innocent’ which is a near perfect description to Kathir’s look. “With Suzhal, Kathir has done away with that tag of his. How? He brings about subtle changes in front of the camera and the transition that we see in the output is impactful by several folds,” remarked Pushkar-Gayatri.
