PremiumExclusive! From Mamta Mohandas to Sshivada, here are the other actors part of Jayasurya’s Sunny
The movie, directed by Ranjith Sankar, will only have a single actor on the screen played by Jayasurya
Last Updated: 10.33 AM, Sep 20, 2021
Movies with just one actor such as Tom Hardy’s Locke, James Franco’s 127 Hours and Tom Hanks' Cast Away were dominated by its sole central character, but to further pad up the narrative, these also featured other characters in different shapes and sizes through phone calls, flashback sequences or even as a basketball. Director Ranjith Sankar’s Sunny, which is a one-actor film with Jayasurya in the lead, also has a supporting cast that might not feature on screen but serve in making the screenplay captivating.
Talking to OTTplay, the director tells us, “Sunny is not a thriller; it’s a human story with some suspense. After I wrote the first draft, I really liked it as something you can read, but to translate it on screen is a different exercise. In Buried and 127 Hours, there’s that element of whether the characters will escape that keeps the audience intrigued. Sunny didn’t have those, and so to make it interesting, it required a lot of layers and plot points.”
To further the story and keep it interesting, Ranjith says he introduced Sunny’s wife, lover, acquaintance, a close friend, a friend who betrayed him, a sister, a police officer and a doctor who helps him and is like his father, with whom he shares a special relationship. “These characters are played by great actors like Siddique, Innocent, Mamta Mohandas, Vijayaraghavan, Sshivada, Aju Varghese and others. They come in different forms in the film and add more layers to the film,” adds the filmmaker.
Ranjith had previously worked with Mamta in Passenger and Varsham, Sshivada in Su.. Su.. Sudhi Vathmeekham and Aju Varghese in Su.. Su.. Sudhi Vathmeekam and Kamala.
And it’s just these characters that make the movie engaging. “It was clear from the onset that such a movie wouldn’t work just on performance. For Sunny, the margin of error was zero, to keep the viewers engaged. So, it should have good sound design,” says the director, who shot with sync sound for the first time for Sunny. Sinoy Joseph, who has worked in Piku, Pink, Gulabo Sitabo and Sardar Udham Singh, has handled the sound department for Sunny.
Moreover, the movie has to be visually stimulating, the director adds. “We can’t rely just on dialogues. The problem with visuals in Sunny was that we had limited space. We knew all this right from the first day. Every scene had to be different from the previous one to make this movie work. It didn’t require much editing because we just had one actor and so each scene had to be choreographed brilliantly,” says Ranjith. “We knew for Sunny to stand out, every dimension should gel – from its scripting, choreography and editing to its sound design and background score.”