Besides his home turf, Malayalam, actor Jayaram is also known for his performances in Telugu cinema. One of his most popular Telugu titles is Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo, director Trivikram Srinivas' 2020 film, also starring Allu Arjun and Pooja Hegde. The actor recently talked about how Allu Arjun helped him deliver some of the more difficult lines in Telugu while working on the film.
Speaking to Club FM, Jayaram said that he could not memorise certain dialogues for the 2020 film no matter how hard he tried. Eventually, Allu Arjun agreed to stick pieces of paper containing those lines on his chest and forehead so that his co-star could say them. "One day, he came on set sticking paper to his face and told me, 'Write whatever you want,'" Jayaram laughed.
In fact, the aforementioned was not the actor's original idea. It is a trick that he learnt from the sets of his 2011 film China Town, co-starring Mohanlal, Dileep, Kavya Madhavan, and Suraj Venjaramoodu, among others. China Town starred Pradeep Rawat as the villain. "He did not know Malayalam all that well. Even prompting did not work with him," Jayaram said about his China Town co-star Pradeep.
The actor then referred to Pradeep's difficulty in saying a line where the latter's character gives a death threat to the lead heroes. "Nothing worked for him. Eventually, the lines were stuck to Dileep's chest and Lal sir's face, and he used that to deliver them," the actor said, recalling the shooting experience.
Interestingly, Mohanlal has also used a similar idea for his Hindi film Company, directed by Ram Gopal Varma and co-starring Ajay Devgn and Vivek Oberoi, among others. Speaking at the Vanitha Film Awards 2020, Vivek spoke about how his Company and Lucifer co-star delivered the Hindi lines in the Ram Gopal Varma directorial. "He would go to one corner, stand there for a while and say the line, then walk to another corner and deliver another line. After the scene, I realised that he had written Hindi lines in Malayalam and hidden the papers," Vivek said, eliciting a smile from Mohanlal himself. Vivek also said that he used the same technique to deliver the Malayalam lines in his film Lucifer, directed by Prithviraj Sukumaran.