PremiumArchana Jois on Yuddhakaanda: I wanted to break free from the 'KGF mother' image, but…
Archana Jois explains why she took up the role of Niveditha - a mother, whose young child becomes a victim of abuse - who is at the centre of the tale of Yuddhakaanda, which releases on April 18.
Last Updated: 03.30 PM, Apr 04, 2025
Despite her best efforts, Kannada actress Archana Jois is far from breaking free of the image she got with just one film – Rocky Bhai’s mother in the KGF series. She’s not done too many films since, and so far, Kshetrapati, in which she was a journalist and Naveen Shankar’s romantic interest, was the only one that was a far cry from the KGF-kind of roles that she gets offered every now and then. And yet, in her next, the courtroom drama Yuddhakaanda – Chapter 2, she plays a mother yet again. How did that come to be?
Why Archana Jois went ahead and took up another 'mother' role in Yuddhakaanda
Archana says that in her version of events, when she was first approached to be a part of the film, she was told she’d be the heroine in a Krishna Ajai Rao movie. She said okay almost immediately, because after KGF, she was getting similar roles and wanted a change. “Since they said heroine, I thought that filmmakers finally have a different perception of me as an artiste. When director Pavan Bhat then came to narrate the story, I knew that the heroine’s role was quite nice and not just the love interest; she’s also a lawyer. I was intrigued by the character of Niveditha, a mother whose child is an abuse victim and is, therefore, at the centre of the story. I wanted to know who would be playing Niveditha,” says Archana.
Once the question was popped, Pavan’s immediate response was to ask if Archana would do it and she told him she needed some time to revert. The actress adds, though, that it was the filmmaker’s way of planting the idea in her head and getting exactly what he wanted. Apparently in Pavan’s version of events, he had approached Archana for the role of Niveditha and she had rejected it, so he went back to her and dangled the heroine’s character, only to then subtly push her into taking up the former.
Archana admits that she took a while to get back to the team, as she was in a dilemma about getting typecast in character roles. “On the one hand, I was wondering if I only want to do heroine roles, while on the other, I was drawn to the role of Niveditha and the story, which I thought, needed to be told. It had a lot of scope for performance, in fact, far more than Ajai sir, and that was the clincher eventually,” she added.
Yuddhakaanda Chapter 2 will release in theatres on April 18.