Pavan Wadeyar: I’d love to make Googly 2, but Yash is a global superstar today, we need to trust his vision and decisions

Kannada filmmaker Pavan Wadeyar’s Googly is widely seen as the film that gave Rocking Star a turning point in his career. The superstar has had no looking back since then, growing from strength-to-strength, but it is his outing as Googly’s Sharath that got him there. In fact, KGF maker Prashant Neel has said multiple times that he took note of Yash and believed he had what it takes to play Rocky Bhai after seeing him in Googly. The Kannada film, which paired Yash with Kriti Kharbanda, came out nine years ago and every now and then there have been reports that there could be a sequel to the romantic drama. Pavan and Kriti have shown interest in the past, but as of now, the filmmaker says that there are no plans for Googly 2 and here’s why…

“Yash is a global superstar today. As an actor who’s just had a film that made over Rs 1,200 crore at the box office, he has immense responsibility to live up to that with his future projects. He is the man who followed Rocky Bhai’s motto – The world is my territory – to the T. He has single-handedly taken Kannada cinema on to a different platform and what we need to do is sit back and see what his future decisions are going to be. He has shown us his ability as an actor and his vision for cinema. So, we cannot put pressure on him to do a film that may or may not match that for the sake of fans. As of now, I have no plans to make Googly 2, but if Yash were to call me and give me that opportunity, I would love to do it,” Pavan told an online news media amid the promotions of his maiden production venture, the national award-winning Dollu, which is coming to theatres on August 26.

Pavan, however, is immensely proud that almost a decade later, Googly is still as popular as it was back then and has been sold for remakes in multiple languages. The filmmaker says that the appeal stems from the fact that the character Sharath has been moulded on Yash’s personality traits, which helped him write the role. The icing on the cake, he adds, is that Yash executed it really well.