One phone call from Yash: why Nayanthara showed up for Toxic

Nayanthara at a promotional event is rare enough to be its own headline. So when she walked out on stage at the Toxic trailer launch in Bengaluru on Friday, alongside Kiara Advani, Huma Qureshi, Tara Sutaria and Rukmini Vasanth, she addressed the elephant in the room herself. “It is not that I have some principle against attending film promotions,” she said. “It just does not come naturally to me, so I stay away from it. But this film is very special to me, and I think the reason is Yash. One phone call from Yash was enough to bring me here.”

Yash returned the compliment with interest. His thank-you to Nayanthara was the most detailed stretch of his speech: “You are a Lady Superstar. You carry films built around you, and I know exactly what your fan base and your market are. You had date problems when you took this film, but the way you handled it after committing, I loved. You have given your best, and you are a strength to this film.” He also noted the kinship in how they operate: “She, like me, does not come to promotions. Coming to these events is not easy. You have to speak, and what do you say? Sometimes we end up saying too much. Today she came, and she spoke from her heart.”

Nayanthara, for her part, admitted she had initially turned the film down; big ensembles make her cautious. She agreed to hear Geetu Mohandas narrate, signed on, and came away calling Yash the hardest-working actor she has encountered, a man who has given the project four and a half years at the cost of family and personal time. Yash even let slip a character detail while praising her: her Ganga is sister to his character, “the most badass sister anyone can have.”

The trailer the evening was built around runs a full four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, and it confirms the worst-kept secret of the campaign: Yash plays both father and son. The older Raya, bearded and heavy with menace, and the younger Ticket, clean-shaven and wiry, circle each other through a period Goa of ports, clubs, circuses and cartel muscle, and the cut opens on the two of them mid-collision. Blood arrives early and often. The women each get a loaded frame: Nayanthara’s Ganga as the family’s enforcer, Kiara Advani as the circus performer Nadia, Huma Qureshi as Elizabeth, Tara Sutaria as Rebecca, Rukmini Vasanth as Mellisa. Akshay Oberoi plays Tony. The teaser had hinted at the transformation; the trailer makes the father-son faceoff the engine of the film.

Nayanthara’s Ganga, the sister and enforcer in Raya’s world.

Yash used the stage to reframe what kind of release this is. “It is no more Kannada, Tamil, Telugu. This is an Indian film,” he said, a line that lands differently from an actor whose two KGF films did more than anyone’s to make that sentence real. He thanked his wife Radhika Pandit for living with him through the shoot and its multiple physical transformations, calling himself a difficult person to be around when he is inside a project. And when the conversation turned to the online chatter around Kiara Advani’s intimate scenes, he backed his co-star without hedging, saying actors should follow their choices rather than pre-empt reactions, and that the film may simply be a little ahead of its time. Geetu Mohandas, who wrote the film with Yash, had the evening’s most emotional beat, telling the crowd that Yash showed faith in her when nobody else would.

The scale under all this is considerable. Rajeev Ravi shot the film, Ujwal Kulkarni edits, and the action comes from a combined unit of Hollywood’s J.J. Perry, the Anbariv duo, Thai stunt veteran Kecha Khamphakdee and Amrit Singh. The six-song album splits between Vishal Mishra, Ravi Basrur and a Tanishk Bagchi, Faheem Abdullah and Arslan Nizami team, with Basrur also scoring; Tabaahi and Thadumaarudhe are already out. Production reportedly cost in the region of ₹500 crore, and the Tamil Nadu theatrical rights alone went for a reported ₹63 crore.

There is a tidy symmetry to the date, too. Cameras first rolled on Toxic on August 8, 2024, a date picked partly because Yash considers eight auspicious; the trailer arrived exactly two years later, to the day. In between came a production long enough to burn through three announced release dates, from April 2025 through March and June this year. The fourth one is holding: Toxic, subtitled A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, opens worldwide on August 26 in Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi.