Somewhere between his breakout in Mani Ratnam‘s ‘Gitanjali’ in the late 1980s and his forthcoming 100th film, Akkineni Nagarjuna has made four decades feel like a beginning.
The son of the legendary Akkineni Nageswara Rao – one of the all-time giants of Indian cinema – he built his own formidable career from the mid-1980s onward, with landmark films including Mani Ratnam’s 1989 Indian National Film Award-winning romantic drama “Gitanjali,” Ram Gopal Varma’s landmark 1989 action thriller “Shiva,” and the devotional epics “Annamaya” and “Sri Ramadasu.” He has also worked extensively in Bollywood, including Ayan Mukerji’s 2022 fantasy action film “Brahmastra,” taken on a leading role as a former CBI officer in Sekhar Kammula’s “Kuberaa” opposite Dhanush, and played the villain opposite Rajinikanth in Lokesh Kanagaraj’s “Coolie.” Alongside his acting career, he heads Annapurna Studios, one of India’s most storied production and technical facilities. Sitting down with Variety, he reflects on what shaped him, what still drives him, and a milestone project he is keen to unveil with maximum impact.
Nagarjuna is precise about the moment his identity as an actor crystallized. His early Telugu-language films performed well, he says, but it was “Gitanjali” that fundamentally changed things. “That’s when I think I found my feet and the ground where I should tread,” he says. “That’s where it started. Then came ‘Shiva,’ and that locked the whole thing, sealed the whole thing.” He places that shift in a broader cultural context. Around 1988-89, audiences – particularly young people – were ready for something different, especially in south Indian cinema. “The students at the time, the 16, 17, 18 year olds, they wanted a change from the films that were being made, especially in the south. So that made that shift for us. And I was the lucky early bird who caught it.”
Working across multiple Indian film industries, he says, reinforced a conviction he has never abandoned: stories rooted in Indian culture and emotion are what endure. Foreign locations, Western sensibilities – those, he suggests, were passing phases. “From the decades I’ve been in, it’s always been rooted to your culture, rooted to your sentiments or emotions. That’s what people liked.” On the question of star culture, he is candid that the Telugu and Tamil industries operate at a different register of audience devotion – something he traces back to his father’s era and the legendary N.T. Rama Rao. “The star following is immense. It is very, very high. They really look up to them, and they really wait for the films. It’s incredible how they like to be associated with a particular star.”
Among his most personally significant projects, Nagarjuna talks about “Annamaya” and “Sri Ramadasu” – films that blended devotional subject matter, music and mainstream appeal in ways that Telugu commercial cinema rarely attempted at the time. The 1997 K. Raghavendra Rao film cast him as Annamacharya, the 15th century Vaishnavite saint-poet who composed thousands of kirtanas in devotion to Lord Venkateswara of Tirumala – compositions that remain among the most widely heard devotional works in the Telugu-speaking world. He had not fully anticipated the weight of the material when he first read the script. “Right from the first schedule, I felt there was a change in myself,” he recalls. “The unit members were working in just respect – not about me. Just to be a part of that film was so important to them, as if they were working for God.” Character artists were reportedly approaching the director simply to be included as background devotees. Nagarjuna attributes this to the long absence of such films from Telugu screens – the mythological and devotional tradition of the 1950s and 60s had gone quiet, and audiences had missed it. He went into the Annamaya kirtanas (hymns) word by word with the writer. “It was quite a spiritual kind of an awakening for me.”
“Sri Ramadasu” carried a similar charge. Nagarjuna had studied the story of the saint-composer from school textbooks – the king who imprisoned him, the sealed chamber with an opening only at the top through which he was fed. “I learned this from childhood, and that’s how I did that film. That was also a very incredible awakening for me.”
His father is a subject Nagarjuna approaches with both pride and philosophical caution. Legacy, he insists, is not transferable. “Legacy cannot be handed over. Legacy cannot be given. Legacy has to be respected. And then legacy comes after proving yourself.” He counts himself fortunate to have lived up to his father’s reputation – but is clear that his sons, actors Naga Chaitanya and Akhil Akkineni, face the same test independently. “It’s for the people to decide. We just have to try. That’s how I look at it.”
Asked what structural change enabled Telugu cinema’s recent global breakthrough – “Baahubali,” “RRR,” “Pushpa,” “Kalki” – Nagarjuna’s answer cuts through conventional wisdom. The scale was always there, he argues. Telugu and Tamil films were reaching markets including Japan long before the current wave. What hasn’t changed is the sensibility of the filmmakers themselves – directors who return to their villages for festivals, rooted in a tradition of larger-than-life storytelling. “Most of the directors, in their off days, they go back to the village, even now,” he says. He describes a current collaborator who grew up throwing coins and confetti at the cinema screen in his village theater. “They look at the heroes as larger than life. And also rooted – that’s the combination.” The new element, he suggests, is simply that technology has finally caught up with the ambition. “With new knowledge, with the technology, they’re breaking through. And their dreams – which were always larger than life – they’re coming out with these films which you call scaled up. They don’t know anything else to do.”
At this stage of his career, Nagarjuna says he has consciously widened his range as an actor. He describes the “Kuberaa” role – a former CBI officer navigating the space between poverty and extreme wealth – as precisely the kind of part he is seeking out. “I want to experiment. I want to try different things.” A small but meaningful part in “Brahmastra” is cited in the same breath. “Now I don’t have to be the lead man – and I will have to be the lead man. Both. I’m working on both of them. My choices have become much wider. I’ve opened up the doors.” As a producer, the starting point is always commercial viability – “the film has to run well, the film has to make money” – but he sees that calculus becoming more nuanced. The new generation of audiences is globally exposed and no longer requires films to fit a template. “That gives us a wide range to choose from.”
On the motion capture facility recently launched at Annapurna Studios – with S.S. Rajamouli officiating and using it for key sequences of “Varanasi” – Nagarjuna is candid that it should have happened sooner. He points to the “Avatar” series and notes that part of “Brahmastra” was captured using motion capture facilities in Bulgaria. Having Rajamouli use the Annapurna lab first was the ideal launch platform. “When Rajamouli was going to shoot his ‘Varanasi’ there – what better platform to start it off?” He stresses, though, that the facility alone is not sufficient. Directors and cinematographers need to train in it, need to want to understand it. “It will make life easier, definitely for actors – they can achieve impossible things there.”
The Annapurna College of Film and Media – now more than a decade old – was born from a conviction he shared with his father: that filmmaking in India had simply been passed on informally, from guru to assistant, on-set and on-the-run. “My father always said, why isn’t there, for such an important industry in the country, a training ground?” The college, developed in partnership with Jawaharlal Nehru Architecture and Fine Arts University to offer both bachelor’s and master’s degrees, covers screenplay writing, editing, photography, acting and direction, with students specializing after two years. The location – inside a fully operational studio – is itself part of the philosophy. “What better place to have a college right in the middle of everything that is happening, in a proper, full-fledged studio, where shootings are happening, post-production is happening.” Short films from the college are now being selected by international festivals, and graduates are finding their way into the advertising industry. “When I come to do some work in Mumbai, suddenly some ad guy comes up and says, ‘I’m from your college, sir.’ So it feels very good.”
Looking ahead, Nagarjuna is roughly 45% through production on his 100th film – currently carrying the working title “King 100,” though he says no final title has been decided. Directed by Ra Karthik, the film is, in Nagarjuna’s own words, “a total commercial script,” with a father-daughter drama at its center and a rags-to-riches story running through it. De-aging technology will be used to portray him from age 25 through 60. The cast includes Tabu, Sushmita Bhatt and Vijayendra, with further additions still being finalized. He is deliberately keeping further details under wraps for a larger reveal. “I really don’t want to reveal the script right now. We want to do it in a very big way.”
As for whether this constitutes a new phase of his career – he pushes back on the framing entirely. “There is no next phase. I never thought of it like that.”