Nayanthara skips the Hi stage, then turns up in the audience

Nayanthara was not on the stage on Thursday when the Hi team gathered in Chennai to say thank you. Kavin, Radikaa Sarathkumar, Prabhu and Suhasini spoke; the film’s lead and co-producer stayed away. Then she walked into Kamala Cinemas, unannounced, while the film was playing to a paying crowd. The room found her before she found her seat. Phones came up, the noise built, and by the time she was handed a microphone she was visibly struggling to hold it together. “Thank you so much for loving our film and supporting us,” was about all she managed. The clips spread within the hour.

The two choices belong to the same person, which is the interesting part. Nayanthara does not give interviews and does not do promotional functions, a position she has kept for most of a decade and explained only once, at the Toxic trailer launch in Bengaluru a month ago: “It is not that I have some principle against attending film promotions. It just does not come naturally to me, so I stay away from it.” That night she made an exception for Yash. For Hi she has made a different kind of exception. She skipped the room with the podium and the press rows and went to the room with the audience in it, which is a fair reading of what a producer who hates stages might do when her film is working. The Tamil trade has noticed that she promoted this one with a warmth she has not shown other films, and put it down to the fact that she owns a piece of it, alongside Vignesh Shivan and S.S. Lalit Kumar. Whether that carries over to films she only acts in is an open question nobody expects her to answer.

The contrast with a week earlier is hard to miss. Toxic opened on August 26 with Nayanthara as Yash’s sister Ganga, took a hundred crore on day one and reviews from hell, and has been written off in Chennai since; a Dinamalar readers’ poll had three in four calling it bad. Hi opened two days later, on August 28, with her name first on the poster, and is the one still drawing crowds into a second week. Same actress, same seven days, a supporting turn in a Kannada epic that collapsed and a lead in a small Tamil film that held. It is not a subtle lesson, and the theatre visit suggests she has taken it: the film she stood up for in Bengaluru is not the one that made her cry in Chennai.

Hi is Vishnu Edavan’s first film as director and Nayanthara’s first with Kavin, with Prabhu, Radikaa Sarathkumar, Suhasini and, in one of his final roles, K. Bhagyaraj around them. Jen Martin composes. It is in its second week in theatres.