The actor's remarks about touching elders' feet and getting kissed back by his 84-year-old father-in-law Benjamin have taken over Tamil social media this week.
Karunas has never been shy about talking, and his latest interview is proof of that. The actor, currently seen in Enna Vilai alongside Nimisha Sajayan, has set off a social media conversation with comments about his father-in-law that range from touchingly personal to genuinely eyebrow-raising.
Speaking to a private channel, Karunas said his father-in-law's name is Benjamin, calling him a wonderful actor and a man of the kind you don't come across anymore. He then got into the habit that started the whole conversation: touching the feet of elders as a mark of respect.
"I have a habit of touching the feet of elders when I see them. It's a good habit," he said, before adding that some people have turned it into something to mock, that north Indians follow the same custom, and that Tamils who taught it to others are now the ones running it down. It's the kind of line that will likely draw its own share of pushback online, given how loaded any north-south framing tends to get in Tamil Nadu's public discourse.
But the bit that's actually trending is what comes next. Karunas said that after he touches his father-in-law's feet, Benjamin kisses him on the lips. "If two men kiss each other on the lips, how disgusting would that be. But when he does it, it doesn't feel that way to me," Karunas said, adding that Benjamin is 84 and that he considers himself lucky to be living among people like him.
For a man who built a career on playing characters with a wink built into them, right from Lodukku Pandi in Bala's Nanda opposite Suriya, this is Karunas talking without a script, and it shows.
That 2001 film is where it all began for him. The judge's-house robbery scenes and the Laila exchanges got him noticed, and the work kept coming after that. He went on to act alongside Kamal Haasan, Simbu and Dhanush, carved out a niche nobody else quite occupied in Kollywood, and picked up side gigs as a music composer and film distributor along the way.
He didn't stop at cinema either. Karunas waded into politics soon after establishing himself on screen, and his name came up prominently in the Koovathur resort episode involving AIADMK MLAs around the time of Jayalalithaa's death. He later aligned himself with the DMK and served as an MLA. His son, Ken Karunas, debuted as an actor under Vetrimaaran before turning director with Youth, which turned out to be a solid hit.
As for the film that brought Karunas back into the news, Enna Vilai opened on September 17 to a middling response. The lip-kiss story, though, is doing far better business on timelines than the film itself right now, and there's no sign of Karunas walking any of it back.
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