On a Monday morning, I sit with the team of Netflix’s upcoming crime thriller series Rana Naidu. My interviewees: creator and director Karan Anshuman, co-director Suparn Verma and the series’ namesake and lead Rana Daggubatti. It might be the skipped breakfast that made me open with a chicken-or-egg question.
“So, what came first? Casting Rana Daggubatti or naming the show Rana Naidu?”
Karan takes one for the team. “We really wanted a powerful name in the title,” he says. “You know, something that evokes a sort of image, power, panache…”
“Do you want an honest answer?” interrupts Suparn.“It was in his contract. He insisted that we name the character Rana.”
“What rubbish,” Daggubatti laughs it off. “For a long time, I thought it was going to be a working title. It has happened to me before that my character is named Rana initially and eventually becomes Shiva or something like that but then the name just kind of stuck around.”
Shakespeare wrote, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Although Rana Naidu is anything but that. In the series, Daggubatti plays a “fixer for the stars.” His job profile includes making sure an actor is on the sets after a night of cocaine-laced revelry, rescuing a cricketer from a prostitute situation and spying on a producer’s young girlfriend. Things aren’t easy back home either. Rana Naidu’s relationship with his wife Naina (Surveen Chawla) is strained, his elder brother Tej (Sushant Singh) suffers from Parkinson’s and younger Jaffa (Abhishek Banerjee) is recuperating from a sexual assault. On top of that, his father, Naga Naidu (Venkatesh Daggubatti), who Rana hates, has been released from prison earlier than expected and is trying to make amends with the family.
Venkatesh is known for his sweet, chocolate-boy image on screen. His Hindi debut Anari (1993) showed him as this benign simpleton, romancing Karishma Kapoor. Cut to 30 years later, in Rana Naidu he is dancing with prostitutes and shouting expletives at his reel-life son and real-life nephew. The show is adapted from the Live Schreiber starrer American series Ray Donovan.
“When I told my father (producer D Suresh Babu) and Venky uncle that I will be doing Ray Donovan’s Indian adaptation, they both sat one evening and started watching the series,” says Daggubatti. “Later, dad came up to me and said, ‘There are only bad people in this, nobody becomes good.’ I was like, ‘Yeah..’ Then one morning, uncle came for breakfast and asked ‘Who is playing your father in the series? I will do it.’
“I guess he was waiting for this role all his life,” says Suparn.
But it doesn’t seem easy to work with a relative, especially when you have to abuse each other on screen. “He (Venkatesh) kept calling me Rana while swearing at me and I was like ‘ehhh’. It was hitting some other note in me,” says Daggubatti. This reminds Suparn of an anecdote. “It was the first scene between Rana and Venkatesh. He is going to face his uncle for the first time in front of the camera. Rana says ‘give me a minute’. He goes to his vanity van and takes a deep breath. Then comes back and stares into his uncle’s eyes. The scene begins. Venky takes out a lighted candle, blows it and says ‘Take this and shove it up you’re a**.’”
“At the end of the day, Rana returns home and his father asks ‘How was your day?’ Good, good.’ He answers.”
“Welcome to the new family drama,” quips Daggubatti.
Rana Naidu streams on Netflix from March 10.
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