Walking into the interview room, the PR for Jio Hotstar's upcoming Malayalam series, Pharma, asked a quintessential PR question, "Doesn't Arun give you a doubt if he is a director or an actor?" The sheepish smiles and the good-natured ribbing notwithstanding, there was some truth to this statement. While the writer and director are indeed the stars of the OTT space, Pharma was born out of Arun's own life. "I used to work in the pharmaceutical industry as a salesman," says Arun, whose series features Nivin Pauly playing the role of a... pharmaceutical salesman. While Arun vehemently denies Pharma being a biopic of any sort, he is clear about one thing. "Even the most powerful people on Earth are the most helpless when they are in the hospital. That is the human emotion we tried to capture."
Helping Arun capture these emotions are his wonderful actors like Nivin Pauly, Rajit Kapur, Shruti Ramachandran, Narain, and Veena Nandakumar, among others. Joining us on the sidelines of the recent Hotstar event, South Unbound, Arun is joined by Rajit and Shruti, who wax eloquently about the kind of research that has gone into the project. "Arun has done a lot of research so that the environment and the background feel authentic, especially the socio-economic structure of the industry," points out Rajit, who returns to the Malayalam industry 26 years after Agnisakshi (1999). "It just had to happen, I guess," says the veteran actor, adding, "Something just clicked. Once I spoke to the producer and Arun, it just fell into place perfectly. It was a very instinctive feeling."
If it was instinct for Rajit, it was almost an inheritance for Shruti, who plays Dr Janaki, a gynecologist, in Pharma. "I've taken a lot of inspiration from my grandmother, who was a gynecologist. A lot of love and respect always surrounded her, and that's something I grew up seeing. So Dr Janaki is a character like that," says Shruti.
In many popular medical dramas, the doctors are often portrayed as people with a god complex, and in some ways, many actors too exhibit that persona simply because they can play various characters and decide the audience's reactions to them. However, both Rajit and Shruti vehemently deny that Pharma is even remotely going into that space. "That was the biggest point for me in Pharma," reveals Shruti, who praises the honesty and genuineness of the script. "All these people seem like people you see, and these are people whom Arun has seen in his life. They are your everyday people." Reiterating this statement, Rajit asserts that the doctors in Pharma aren't larger-than-life characters. "We are playing very real characters, and the series is also about how their lives are intertwined with the pharmaceutical industry."
But mounting a series about the pharmaceutical industry in India is far from easy. There is a lot of beating around the bush that has to happen to ensure no one is offended, and more importantly, nothing untoward happens from a legal standpoint. "We can't tell the full truth anyway," starts off a resigned but determined Arun. "Pharma is essentially about the personal stories of various players in this industry, like the doctors, nurses, salespeople, etc. We have also tried to be as honest as possible in terms of the various situations, the human emotions, especially the suffering," says the filmmaker. However, this approach also means that there is a case to be made about fear-mongering, and how this means that the medical industry, which is already receiving unnecessary flak, might run into more negative PR. "There is no fear-mongering in Pharma at all," says Shruti, and is immediately backed by Rajit, who points out that it is through the characters of these doctors that Pharma lays bare a lot of truths. "You have the good, the bad, and the ugly... all of it. It's for you to judge."
Arun goes a step further and says that Pharma is the fight of doctors against the system. "The first frame of this series is a dedication to the doctors and paramedics, the greatest superheroes of modern society. We know what happened during COVID, right? Even when everything closed down, they were working around the clock, and this is a story about their sacrifices and work for society," says the filmmaker.
If the premise of Pharma is an alluring aspect of the show, the biggest crowd-puller factor is, of course, Nivin Pauly, who is making his debut in long-format storytelling. However, Arun points out that the stardom didn't come in the way of the series at all, and every actor, including Nivin, served the series, and not the other way round. "We didn't change anything after Nivin Pauly came into this. Essentially, he plays a boy-next-door character, which gives him more ease. Also, the character has to travel across many timelines and different ages. Nivin was in an ideal space to portray KP Vinod, and understood the scope of his journey," says the filmmaker, who thanks all of his actors who had to play characters spanning timelines, and shoot in pretty hectic schedules. "We had long shooting hours. That's how we work in Kerala, right? On a normal day, the schedule starts at 6 am and ends at 9.30 pm, which extends to 1 am on hectic days. We shot in live locations like crowded hospitals, packed medical stores, etc. A big thanks to all the actors, who had to go through many physical transformations through the series," says a gratified Arun.
Shruti and Rajit also believe that Pharma releasing on OTT not just allows the story to be told on a particular scale but also gives the audience a chance to find the scale of their respective filmographies and discover their work. "It's a huge positive, right? It's great if people watch Pharma, seek my work out, and see that, too," says Shruti. Taking a leaf out of his decades-long experience in films, OTT, TV serials, and theatre, Rajit shares, "OTT also gives an actor time to work on their characters. Films are restrictive in that sense. And sometimes, in a film, if you've shot a five-minute scene, it may become two and a half in the final version. Here, there is time to pause, I guess. The camera can stay longer on an actor, and allows us to engage more with those characters."
Come December 19, Rajit, Shruti, and Arun will hope that the audience engages more with Vinod, Dr Rajiv, Dr Janaki, and the other characters in the ensemble of Pharma, and ensure that the Jio Hotstar series becomes a worthy addition to the Malayalam web series space.
