Vikram opens up about forbidden romance with Aishwarya Rai on screen, says she always plays ‘love of his life, but married to someone else’ in their films

In an interview with Ranveer Allahbadia, ‘Chiyaan’ Vikram spoke about overlapping themes of his movies with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan.

Aishwarya Rai and Vikram worked together in Mani Ratnam’s Raavanan.

Actor Kennedy John Victor, better known by his stage name Vikram, opened up about his films with Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. The two worked together in films such as Raavan and Raavanan, as well as Ponniyin Selvan: I and Ponniyin Selvan: II. Incidentally, both projects dealt with themes of forbidden love, and Raavan, in particular, became especially sensitive because it also presented a re-imagined version of the Ramayana. Both projects were directed by Mani Ratnam, and in a new interview, Vikram spoke about the ‘unrequited love’ between his characters and those played by Aishwarya.

Appearing on Ranveer Allahbadia’s podcast, he said, “I would love people to watch Raavanan, the Tamil version. It’s a very interesting film, the way Mani sir has crafted it; the way he dwelled on that character, it’s unrequited love… Because it’s about Raavan and Ram, in the north, it wasn’t accepted immediately. And because of that, we felt the backlash in the South also. Raavan didn’t do well here, and automatically people started thinking…”

He said that as time went by, the films developed cult status. “Mani sir is a master craftsman, and the way he got us to perform… He would never tell us how to act, he would create a scene. If Aishwarya is there, and she leaves me and goes, he would say, ‘You’re a kid, and you got lost in the trade fair, and you think it’s the end of the world, and that’s what’s happening here’. That scene isn’t there, but the way he can conjure up an image… I’m very proud of my performance in the film, and it’s all thanks to Mani sir. It really was tricky, because it was about Ram and Sita and he could not do anything that’s questionable. It was a love story about Raavan and Sita but he could not really elevate or amplify that. How close could you come to that without risking the wrath of people? The way he handled it is very poetic.”

 Aishwarya Rai and Vikram worked together in Raavanan.Vikram said that the ‘irony’ is that the same dynamic was replicated in the Ponniyin Selvan movies as well. “Again it’s Aishwarya and me, again she’s somebody else’s wife, again he loves her and she’s the love of his life and he dies because of her… It’s the same thing, and again it got repeated, but Raavanan started it all,” he said.

In a recent interview, the actor had also attempted to decode his famous chemistry with Aishwarya. He told Siddharth Kannan in an interview, “Abhishek is a very close friend of mine so automatically, the family becomes friends too. The thing is, Aishwarya and I, we have very good on-screen chemistry, like whether it was Raavan or whether it was Ponniyin Selvan and both were unrequited love, both were somebody else’s wife, I get killed in both.” Vikram is currently promoting the Hindi dub version of his Tamil film Thangalaan, directed by Pa Ranjith. The film has under-performed at the box office so far, while earning mixed reviews.