Why Mahesh Babu Is the Most Versatile Actor in the Country

I was eight years old in April 2003 when I walked into Swamy Cinema Hall in Rajahmundry with my brother and my cousin brother. The film had released in January. We were watching it in April, in summer holidays, and the show was still housefull. The film was Okkadu.

I didn't know what versatile meant. I didn't know what restraint in acting was. I just knew a full-scale heroic action block was on the screen, Ajay was cutting through Obul Reddy's goons to save Swapna, and somewhere in the middle of that fight, protecting her behind him, he turned and said this:

Nenu mee ooru kabaddi aadataniki vachanu. Kaani aadalsindi ground lo kaadu, ikkada ani ardham ayindi.

He didn't smile. That is what people who haven't watched the scene always get wrong, they assume there is a smile. There isn't. The line is delivered flat, hard, all resolve, everything a lesser actor would have softened with a held-back grin. And then the cut. The goons still searching for him. All you can hear is his breath. All he does is look. No score. Nothing.

Twenty-three years later that cut, from the line to the breath, is still the cleanest piece of acting I have seen in a Telugu film. That was the day.

This isn't a review. It's a fan's log of what I have watched him do since. I'm not comparing him to anyone. I just want to write down why I think he is the most versatile actor working in this country, and why I am quietly losing my mind about Varanasi.

What he has actually done

Take 2003 alone. The same year Okkadu released, he played Seetaram in Nijam for Teja, a young man whose father, a fire officer, has been framed and imprisoned by a local goon named Devudu. The whole film is Seetaram working his way through the town to get his father back. It won him his first Best Actor Nandi. Two lead roles, same year, no shared DNA between them. That isn't someone figuring himself out. That's someone who already knew what he could do.

Then Naani (2004), S. J. Suryah. The premise is a dare. An eight-year-old kid, mistreated at home, is taken in by a scientist who converts him into a 28-year-old adult. But the change isn't clean: he is a child by day and a grown man by night. Mahesh plays both, and refuses to sell the child version as cute. It didn't land commercially in Telugu. The performance is still the cleanest example of what he is willing to risk for a part.

Athadu (2005), first collaboration with Trivikram. Nanda Gopal, Nandu, a hired assassin, gets framed, goes on the run, and ends up in the village of a family who mistakes him for Pardhu, the son they lost years earlier. The whole film lives inside his double life. In the second-half climax there is a scene with the grandfather where, for half a second, his face breaks and he pulls it back. That half-second is the second Nandi.

Pokiri (2006) is the loudest part he has ever played, and even here he underplays. Pandu, a small-time goon in the Ali Bhai gang, turns out to be Krishna Manohar IPS, undercover. Everyone around him screams. He keeps the volume down. The industry spent the next decade copying the template. Nobody made it work without him because the stillness was doing the work.

Khaleja (2010), Trivikram again. Alluri Sitarama Raju, a Hyderabad cab driver, ends up in Rajasthan, where a tantric priest and his pupil identify him as the saviour of the village of Pali, dying from a mysterious plague. The film is mythological, comic, absurd, action-loaded, sometimes at the same time. Mahesh refuses to over-explain any of it, and refuses to under-play any of it. Released to confused reviews. Cult favourite now.

Dookudu (2011), Srinu Vaitla. Comedy. He is DCP Ajay Kumar, IPS, whose father is a politician in coma. The film is packed with Brahmi, MS Narayana, Prakash Raj, Sonu Sood. Mahesh isn't the funniest thing in the frame. He's the reason the funny things land. Timing engine. Setup man. Nobody in Telugu cinema talks about him doing that job, but he does it. Filmfare Best Actor. Third Best Actor Nandi.

1: Nenokkadine (2014). Sukumar wrote Gautham, a rock musician with schizophrenia, missing a quarter of his brain's grey matter, chasing three men he saw murder his parents as a child, except nobody else can see them. The role needs the actor to be uncertain about his own reality, and the audience to be uncertain about him. Mahesh took the part. He gave it a coolness on the surface and a visible crack underneath. Audiences didn't know what to do with it in 2014. It is the best acting he has done, and it's not close.

Srimanthudu (2015), Koratala Siva. Harsha Vardhan, silver-spoon billionaire's son, adopts the ancestral village of Devarakota. The premise is public-service material. He plays the character's boredom so honestly that the pivot to farming and reform feels like an actual man remembering something. Real NRIs adopted villages after the film released. Fifth Filmfare Best Actor.

Bharat Ane Nenu (2018), Koratala again. Bharat Ram, an Oxford student on his fifth degree, returns to India after his father, the Chief Minister of AP, dies, and finds himself sworn in as CM. The script wants big speeches. Mahesh doesn't raise his voice once. In the film's most powerful scene he talks to a room of MLAs the way you talk to family at a funeral, and none of them can look at him.

Maharshi (2019), Vamshi Paidipally. K. Rishi Kumar, US-based CEO of a company called Origins. Older than Harsha, more tired, less sure. Walks away from all of it to save the farming community his childhood friend has been holding together alone. He plays the moment where the decision to leave finally lands, sitting alone in his glass office, and the film could have ended in that shot.

That is ten. He has done twenty-eight. Varanasi will be his twenty-ninth and his first with Rajamouli. Five Filmfare Best Actor wins. Nine Nandis, three of them Best Actor. Four SIIMA Best Actor. There is not a decade in there without a serious performance.

Trivikram was right

Trivikram Srinivas has directed him three times, Athadu, Khaleja, and Guntur Kaaram, and has watched him build each of those characters up close. He said this about him once:

Cinema fail avochu, Mahesh fail avadu.
Cinema may fail. Mahesh will not.

Both Khaleja and 1: Nenokkadine were commercial disappointments on release. The performance in each is the reason we still talk about the film today. That is what Trivikram was pointing at. The actor is not tied to whether the film around him works. He shows up either way.

If you have watched enough of him, you know what that means.

He stayed

Every other pan-India lead was moving to Bombay, learning Hindi, chasing the bigger market. Mahesh didn't. He has never done a Hindi film in his career. He stayed with Telugu, and trusted the work would travel.

It did. Baahubali cracked the door. RRR walked through it. Pushpa broke it wide open in the masala lanes. The centre of gravity of Indian cinema moved to Telugu without Mahesh having to leave. Staying is a different kind of courage than going, and I don't think we talk about it enough.

Varanasi

And then there is Varanasi.

November 15, 2025. Ramoji Film City. Fifty thousand fans. Live on JioHotstar. The crowd chanting Jai Babu, Jai Jai Babu for hours. At the end of it Rajamouli walked on stage and revealed the film's title, the one he had been preparing for years. Varanasi.

Then he played the concept reel.

Mahesh was on the screen as Rudhra, a trishul in his hand, riding a charging bull. Priyanka Chopra Jonas as Mandakini. Prithviraj Sukumaran as the antagonist, Kumbha. The film, Rajamouli said, spans thousands of years, from ancient Bharat to the modern day, with one sequence inspired by a chapter from the Ramayana. The story turns on the city of Varanasi facing the impending arrival of an asteroid. Globetrotting adventure with Indian roots.

Then Rajamouli mentioned the format. 1.43:1 IMAX. First Indian film. First non-English film in cinema history in that ratio. The frame Nolan uses for Oppenheimer and Dunkirk. The frame that makes a single human face fill an entire IMAX screen.

Sit with that for a second.

Mahesh's face has been the whole scene since 2003. The kabaddi-court cut. Nandu's half-second face-break. Pandu's stillness. Gautam's uncertain eyes. Rishi's decision-to-leave sit. Rajamouli, of all directors, is now going to shoot that face at IMAX 1.43:1 as Rudhra, in a sequence coded off the Ramayana, across millennia. The shot that is coming for us has not existed in Indian cinema before.

Not because Mahesh hasn't been an actor before. He has been an actor for as long as I have been watching him. The next dimension is because he is finally going to be inside a frame large enough for what he has been doing all along.

The film is out in summer 2027. There is a clock inside my head already.

A wish

That eight-year-old is a long way from that April 2003 show now. My brother and my cousin brother are in different cities. We watched Okkadu together because that's what you did with brothers and cousins in the summer, with the show still housefull three months after release. The film and the line and the cut to the breath are still in all of us in some form.

If you have never watched him work, here's what I'd do. Start with Athadu. Then 1: Nenokkadine, then Khaleja, then Nani. Sit with Maharshi. Watch Okkadu last, because that's where it starts, and you'll want to be armed for the kabaddi-court cut.

Then watch Varanasi with us. We are DHFM. We have been waiting twenty-three years for the rest of the world to catch up.

I don't need him to win an Oscar to know what he is. I would just like the rest of the world to sit inside one of his scenes for two minutes and figure it out on their own. If Varanasi is the film that gets them there, so be it.

He came to play kabaddi. He always knew the game wasn't on the ground.

Varanasi to the world.

Mahesh, sir, thank you.

a fan since 2003