Ram Charan and A.R. Rahman roll into Chennai for Peddi

With four days left before it opens, Peddi reached Chennai, and the team brought its heaviest names to the Tamil leg of a tour that has already worked Mumbai, Bhopal and Delhi: Ram Charan, A.R. Rahman, director Buchi Babu Sana and producer Venkata Satish Kilaru of Vriddhi Cinemas, who fielded the city’s media together ahead of the June 4 worldwide release.

Ram Charan plays the title role, a crossover athlete at the centre of what the makers call a sports action drama, and the part has put him through the kind of physical overhaul he has talked up at every stop on the tour. For a Tamil audience, though, Rahman is the headline as much as the star. Peddi is his first score for a Telugu film, and the music has led the promotion from the start: three singles are already out, Chikiri Chikiri, Rai Rai Raa Raa and Hellallallo, and his background score was the part of the trailer people kept coming back to when it dropped in May. The music rights alone reportedly fetched around Rs 35 crore, which tells you how much of the film’s pitch is riding on the soundtrack.

Peddi is Buchi Babu Sana’s follow-up to Uppena, and his grittier instincts are what the early reactions have latched onto. The shoot was a long haul, starting in Mysuru in late 2024 and moving through Hyderabad, Colombo, Kanyakumari and Pune across the year that followed. Shiva Rajkumar, who has a role in the film, came to the Chennai event as a guest, the kind of cross-industry turnout that has shadowed Peddi from city to city.

The wider ensemble puts Janhvi Kapoor, in her first Telugu film, opposite Charan, with Divyenndu, Jagapathi Babu and Boman Irani in support and Rathnavelu behind the camera. It is a cast assembled from four industries, which is part of why the promotion has been able to draw a different big name at each stop.

The Chennai leg comes days after the team met the press in Delhi, part of the same nationwide push. Peddi opens on June 4 in Telugu, dubbed across Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi, and goes out in the premium formats, IMAX, Dolby and 4DX among them.