Shodha’s Pawan Kumar on why young actors should not only depend on the big screen

Lucia and U-Turn fame actor-filmmaker Pawan Kumar has been urging actors to make themselves available to create more Kannada content and build an audience

Kannada actor-filmmaker Pawan Kumar leads a new Kannada suspense thriller show called Shodha, which is set to come to Z5 (via OTTplay Premium also) on August 22, 2025. This is the platform’s second original Kannada series only, and the buzz in the industry has been about the budgetary constraints that teams collaborating with the streamer have been facing. Pawan, who has served as script doctor on the show for fine-tuning and giving it a better sense of direction, admits that the budgets allocated for Kannada shows are low, but doesn’t see it as a deterrent.

Pawan Kumar in Shodha

Instead, he believes that people like him owe it to the Kannada industry, which has been neglected by streaming platforms for years, to step up, work within these limitations, create content and build an audience. This, he believes, will, in due course of time, encourage other platforms to invest on Kannada content and create more jobs.

Pawan Kumar: These days, actors make 1 film in 3-4 years; movies are eating up a lot of their time

Pawan, who has not worked in Kannada for a while - his last film being Dhoomam in Malayalam – says that his observation is that everyone’s stuck in this idea of only being able to work within certain budgets, which tend to be on the higher side. “Here (Zee with shows like Shodha), the budgets are not massive, like you’d see on other major platforms. Zee is also experimenting, because the business dynamics don’t really tell them that they should even do this in Kannada. It’s something that they are trying out, so the budgets are small,” he admits.

The actor-filmmaker adds that with a series like Shodha, audiences should not care about the budgets, because they get to watch something engaging. As far as industry folks go, Pawan says that Shodha will show them what can be achieved within such budgets. “Young directors, writers and actors should pick these projects and do more of them. I don’t think we should depend on the big screen as the only avenue, especially the young folks who have just come into the industry or have done a film or two. It’s really eating up a lot of their time,” he says.

Pawan elaborates that back when he was assisting filmmaker Yogaraj Bhat, there was a minimum guarantee that with every actor, at least one film could be done in a year. “That’s now become one in 3-4 years sort of a situation. I really hope that the story and the way audiences respond to Shodha encourages others to think that budgets are not a limiting factor, but can be a way to be more creative,” he says.

Unlike films, where filmmakers deal with the pressure of return on investment, with series, platforms are not looking at it in terms of money earned from one project, he adds. “They are looking at the growth of the platform over a period of a year or two. That takes away pressure from the creator, which in turn gives him a little more room to think about the story, performances. I think that’s a great space for a creator to go and safely do something that they believe in,” Pawan says.