‘Rana Naidu’ different from what people expect us to do together: Venkatesh on working with Rana Daggubati

Mumbai, Feb 15 (PTI) Actor Venkatesh Daggubati on Wednesday said he is glad he got to share screen space with his nephew Rana Daggubati in “Rana Naidu”, a show which is not the usual family drama that their fans were expecting them to do together.

An official adaptation of acclaimed American series “Ray Donovan”, the Netflix show brings together the real life uncle-nephew duo for the first time.

It follows the life of Rana Naidu (Rana), the go-to guy for everyone in Bollywood when they have a problem, and his tense equation with estranged father Naga (Venkatesh).

“It was fantastic and really wonderful that I got to work with my nephew Rana, and he has done a wonderful job… It is not the usual kind of family drama. I am not soft with him and we are not singing songs. This is what people will expect from us to do when we work together.

“But this is different and there are some hard hitting dialogues. It was really nice and I am really glad that we got to do it,” Venkatesh, 62, told reporters here at the show’s trailer launch event.

Rana said he was also looking forward to doing something unusual with his uncle.

“From the time I made it in my career, I knew I would do this at some point in my life. And I just wanted it to not be cliche but cool and something where we can consistently revisit characters over and over again. I couldn’t have asked for anything better than ‘Rana Naidu’,” the 38-year-old actor said.

“Rana Naidu” marks Venkatesh’s return to Hindi film industry after his 1995 Bollywood movie “Taqdeerwala”. He debuted in Hindi cinema with “Anari” (1993), which was a remake of his film “Chanti”.

Venkatesh said the upcoming show helped him break his onscreen image of a soft-spoken family hero.

“This is some kind of a jump for me. It is really crazy, wild… It has been a huge challenge for me. I am supposed to be a family hero, soft spoken guy, who did a lot of comedy films… But this is something really amazing. I got to do something different. And since it’s a different character I took it as a challenge,” he added.

The actor admitted it was difficult to dive into the world of “Rana Naidu” as he had to deliver some hard-hitting dialogues but his directors Karan Anshuman and Suparn Verma helped him a lot.

Rana said he found it extremely challenging to express hatred and throw expletives at his uncle’s character.

“In this show, I had to hate the person I love the most and that’s my uncle. It was very hard to use foul language because it was stressing him and stressing me too. It was fine as long as it was in Hindi but in Telugu it was too much. That was the most difficult part.”

About his long absence from Hindi cinema, Venkatesh said it was worth the wait.

“If something takes so long, you don’t be bound my time. You wait for something nice to happen and this is what has happened,” he said.

Also starring Ashish Vidyarthi, Abhishek Banerjee, Priya Banerjee, Gaurav Chopra and Sushant Singh, “Rana Naidu” is set to premiere on March 10.