Actor Sriimurali had a bombastic start to his film career with Chandra Chakori, which did phenomenally well at the box office. He followed that up with Kanti, which got him a Karnataka State Award for Best Actor. But then, for almost a decade, not only was there a slump in his career, but Sriimurali was literally going nowhere, until, his brother-in-law, Prashant Neel came along and changed things around.

What Ugramm did for Sriimurali

Until Ugramm, Sriimurali was largely doing boy-next-door, cutesy lover boy roles, which changed, giving him an action hero avatar. “Ugramm was a gamechanger and I am blessed to get that film. Until Ugramm, I was always given romantic hero roles. Ugramm gave me a slightly larger-than-life action hero image and I have Prashant to thank for that,” Sriimurali said in a recent interview with Galatta Telugu.

Prashant has often spoken about how tough it was for him to make Ugramm and that while it is considered a cult movie today, back when it came out, he did not make money of it. What he was sure of, though, was that he would retell this tale of friendship on a much bigger and better canvas. Sriimurali adds that Prashant had a lot of ideas even for Ugramm, much of which was abandoned before the shoot, because the actor did not see the merit in it.

Later, when Prashant began working on Salaar, Sriimurali didn’t know at first that it was the Ugramm remake. “I thought, ‘Hey, this is my movie’, but I soon realized that he was making a better version of our film and was trying to create a new world. In fact, back when he was ideating for Ugramm, a lot of the things that he wanted to do, I was not on board with. I was not sure if people would accept it. I wanted the narrative style to be more realistic. He had told me then that he would do this film in a different way at some stage. And that makes me very proud of him,” Sriimurali added.

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