Pradeep Ranganathan has been having an eventful year with his successful outing with Dragon earlier this year and will be seeing two more releases soon - Dude, which hits theatres in a week and Vignesh Shivan's Love Insurance Kompany for December.
Ahead of Dude's release, Pradeep opened up about the iconic intermission scene in Ashwath Marimuthu's Dragon and how it was starkly different from the script he had in mind. In an interview with Gulte, Pradeep noted how he was not able to crack the complete script of the entertainer and make it work logically. "I kept the script aside. Ashwath was the right person who could bring adequate aesthetics to it. He told me that he was not going to use even one scene from my script. He took a leaf out of the peg that a person has to complete 48 arrears. In fact, my interval block had me standing in the court," he shared.
"I had written it in a way that the judge orders me to go back to college. I kept wondering how this would connect logically, and Ashwath brought that out well. That's why I didn't do that story as I couldn't get the right logical point to it. I even made it seem like the judge was sympathetic to education! It didn't land at all," he recalled, stating that he surrendered to Ashwath's direction and worked as an actor in Dragon. The rest was history.
Dragon, released in February, received rave reviews upon release for its entertaining and engaging storyline that connects with the current generation. The film also starred Anupama Parameswaran and Kayadu Lohar. Mysskin, Gautham Vasudev Menon, KS Ravikumar and George Maryan appear in supporting roles.
Dude, slated to hit theatres on October 17, also stars Pradeep Ranganathan and Mamitha Baiju in the lead roles, alongside Neha Shetty, R Sarathkumar, Hridhu Haroon, Rohini and others. The romantic action film has been directed by Keerthiswaran in his debut.
Upon release, Dude will clash with Mari Selvaraj-Dhruv Vikram's Bison and Harish Kalyan's Diesel at the box office. Earlier, LIK and Dude were set to fight it out in theatres on the same day, but after multiple discussions, Vignesh Shivan's team decided to move the film for the welfare of both the films.
