The director, who was first AD on Sita Ramam, says he told Rashmika Mandanna she'd be his heroine one day, and two years later he wrote her a period action drama about a Gond tribe.
Before Mysaa had a script, it had a moment on a Sita Ramam set.
Rawindra Pulle, who directs Rashmika Mandanna's upcoming period action drama, told Variety India that he was first AD on Sita Ramam, and doubled up as additional dialogue writer and second-unit director for a few sequences. He shot some of Rashmika's portions himself. Somewhere in that process, watching her eyes carry a scene, he decided he'd found his lead for whatever he made next.
"I love her eyes, and in one of the sequences, I saw the intense anger depicted in her eyes, and I knew I had found my Mysaa," Pulle said. He says he told her that day she'd be his heroine someday, and calls it manifestation. Whatever it was, it worked. When he eventually narrated the Mysaa script to her, she signed on.
Mysaa is set among the Gond tribe and leans into the kind of physical, intense performance Pulle says he first clocked on that Sita Ramam shoot. Per his account to Variety India, Rashmika trained in Italy and Thailand for the action choreography, working through postures and kicking sequences most Telugu heroines wouldn't touch on a first outing in the genre. Pulle says she "never said no" through the process and gave it, in his words, 1000 per cent.
The teaser that's out now backs up the pitch. It's been doing rounds on social timelines this week, with the Hindi cut also making the circuit, and the reaction has largely centred on Rashmika's rawer, angrier register, a departure from the softer roles she's built her name on across Telugu, Kannada and Hindi cinema.
That departure is the whole point of the casting story. Sita Ramam gave Pulle a front-row seat to an actor he clearly thought was underused elsewhere, and Mysaa is his attempt to correct that, one arms-training schedule at a time.
The film is scheduled to open in theatres on November 27, 2026. That puts it in a busy end-of-year window, and Rashmika's calendar this year has already had her stretched across a music promotion run for Ranabaali and a Vogue World Milan appearance alongside international names like Dua Lipa and Dakota Johnson. Mysaa is meant to be the outlier on that list, the one built entirely around a look one director says he clocked years before anyone wrote a scene for it.
What's left is the wait to see if the finished film backs up the teaser's promise, or if the anger in the eyes turns out to be the best scene in the trailer and nothing past it. November 27 will settle that.
Be the first to comment
Join the argument. No password, just your email or a passkey.