He’s a doctor in one, and has an alien ally in another!

Sivakarthikeyan is in an exciting phase in his career. The actor, who’s played a nurse and a superhero of sorts in his films Remo and Hero, respectively, will now be seen playing a doctor in Doctor and team up with an alien in Ayalaan! The first-look posters of the two films were released yesterday, and show the actor in two different set-ups.
Ravikumar, who’s helming the sci-fi fantasy Ayalaan, tells us, “This is probably the first time that something like this is being attempted in Tamil cinema.When I decided to do this film, I actually felt like a street cricketer who’s been asked to play an international match. There’s a lot of production work involved, even between schedules, and that’s why it took us a while to restart shoot.”
Mention the alien that features in the film, and the excitement in his voice becomes palpable. “There have been so many films in Hollywood that have shown aliens. Even in Bollywood, there’s Koi... Mil Gaya, which features Jadoo, the alien. I heard that the makers had used prosthetics on an artiste to get him to resemble an alien. But here, it’s all VFX. So, when Sivakarthikeyan is shooting in real-time, he really has no reference to the alien that will be seen on screen. To assist him, we’ve got a small boy to stand in front of him so that he can look at somebody and act. But the challenge will be when we sync this on the VFX screen,” he says, “We watched a few films from a similar genre only to make sure that whatever we’ve written for the film hasn’t appeared elsewhere. Nobody has seen an alien and this is a creature that’s part of our imagination — a huge head, big eyes, elongated ears…. that’s the image we all have. So, we’ve used that imagination to come up with our friendly alien,” he says.
Buzz is, Sivakarthikeyan plays a triple role in it. “No, he’s just one person,” Ravikumar retorts, “We are hoping to wrap up the film by April and start our post-production work.”
Meanwhile, Sivakarthikeyan is shooting in Goa for Nelson’s Doctor. “He didn’t undergo any prep to play a doctor,” says producer Kotapadi J Rajesh, “The highlight of the film is that Siva will be surrounded by a battery of characters and not even a single person will look out of place. The team will shoot in Goa till March 3, and after a 10-day schedule in Chennai, it’s a wrap for the film.”