Peddi: Ram Charan's rural sports drama opens June 4

Peddi, Ram Charan’s first release since Game Changer, opens in theatres worldwide on June 4, and it carries a first that has little to do with its star: it is the Telugu debut of A.R. Rahman as a film composer, whose songs for the rural sports drama have been the loudest part of the buildup so far.

Director Buchi Babu Sana, who broke through with Uppena, frames Peddi as a story rooted in village India: a crossover athlete from the rural interior whose journey the recent trailer leans into. Ram Charan moves through several physical transformations in it, and he singled out the wrestler’s build as the hardest. “I simply followed what the script asked for,” he said, brushing off the praise for the work that went into it.

Janhvi Kapoor, making her Telugu debut, plays the lead and described her character as bold and “rowdy,” modelled, she said, on Buchi Babu Sana’s own attitude on set. Her sharpest line was about her co-star. Off camera, she said, Ram Charan conserves his energy and stays quiet; the moment a take begins, “the screen detonates.” She called the film a mass entertainer about overlooked Indians and their fight to be recognised.

Divyenndu Sharma described Peddi as a survival tale of identity and said sharing the frame with that ensemble, which also includes Shiva Rajkumar, Jagapathi Babu and Boman Irani, was the kind of shoot he would remember. Boman Irani went further at the Delhi leg of the film’s promotional tour, calling it a film that drags real talent out of India’s villages into the light and predicting young viewers would walk out wanting to be Peddi.

For producer Venkata Satish Kilaru, this is a debut production, and he has been pitching it as a family watch as much as a Charan vehicle. Ram Charan made the same appeal, telling parents to bring their children, and tied the film to a wider idea: that the stories which travel are the ones tied to the soil. He recounted a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had told him about a young man named Mohammad from West Bengal who pushed 80 others in his village toward representing India in sport. That, Charan said, is the resilience Peddi is reaching for.

The team has spent two and a half years on the film. It reaches screens, dubbed across Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi alongside the Telugu original, on June 4, the date it finally settled on after a couple of moves.