Perfecting the voice of a superstar
Mayur Vyas, who is Rajinikanth’s voice in all his Hindi flicks, including Kabali, talks about bagging the role and the challenges that come with it
It’s every professor’s deepest wish to have the group he’s addressing pay full attention to him. For Mayur Vyas — a Mumbai-based college professor, July 22 marked the day his wish was fulfilled. Not only did his voice blare across packed theatres in almost every corner of the country, it also commanded every ounce of attention from those present, for it was superstar Rajinikanth himself who added life to his voice on the screen. Mayur, who is the voice of Rajini’s Kabali in Hindi, has also lent his voice to the superstar in his last three releases —
Lingaa, Robot and Sivaji. While it clearly is a tall order, the established voice-over artiste, who has Hindi versions of the likes of Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr to his credit, tells us about the challenges of being a voice over artiste and how it was Rajini himself who helped him pull it off. “I still haven’t had the chance to meet him personally,” says Mayur, clarifying that the help he got was not from the man himself, but from the persona. While he hasn’t got the superstar’s feedback yet, he adds that every film he gets of Rajini is an approval from the star for the previous one. Mayur tells us how he got the opportunity to do Kabali and says, “When I heard that
Kabali was happening, I was hoping I would hear from the team. It was then that one of my very close friends Mohan Nair called me and said that he was doing the Hindi dub of Kabali and wanted me on board. We went to Chennai to meet the director Pa. Ranjith and the team really liked my voice, and I ended up doing the film.”
The challenge, says Mayur is to keep the dialogues, which were originally meant for Tamil, from sounding caricature-ish. “If you look at Rajini sir’s original renditions, even his Tamil isn’t authentic. So I decided to focus less on the language and more on the nuances and the style.”
While the superstar himself has dubbed in Hindi for many of his Hindi films in the 80s, (such as Chalbaaz), Mayur adds that his style doesn’t take from Rajini’s Hindi. “I tried to take from Chalbaaz, but even there the Hindi he speaks is heavily accented and it becomes caricature-ish. I didn’t want that to be the case because here Rajini is the hero and he needs to be taken seriously.”