Rs 20 a day in a Tiruppur factory town: the 13-year wait behind Soori's rise

Dubai: A week from now, Soori will open a film in which he plays a fishing captain leading a crew through a 100km sailboat race along the Tamil Nadu coast. He performed the sea stunts himself. Thirty-three years ago, he was a teenager in Tiruppur earning Rs 20 for a day's labour and going without meals to send money home.

The distance between those two is one of the more remarkable careers in recent Tamil cinema, and it took him thirteen years just to get through the door.

Two brothers, one traditional pair of names

He was born Ramalakshmanan Muthuchamy in Madurai, a twin, named alongside his brother Lakshmanan in the Ram and Laxman pairing that Hindu families have used for generations. The household was modest and crowded, with six siblings. His cinema education happened in single-screen theatres, watching Rajinikanth.

That fandom eventually rewrote his name. The trigger was Thalapathi, Mani Ratnam's 1991 film in which Rajinikanth played a character called Surya.

"I changed my name from Ramalakshmanan to Surya after being inspired by Rajinikanth," he told Behindwoods in an interview. The industry later shortened it again, and Surya became Soori. He has never been coy about where it came from, describing himself in the same conversation as an absolutely crazy fan of the actor.

Before the ambition, the survival

The film ambition came after a much harder period. In 1993, aged 16, he was working as a daily wage labourer in Tiruppur, the textile town in western Tamil Nadu. Rs 20 a day, which is less than a dirham at today's rates and was not a great deal more in real terms then.

Roughly half of his weekly wages, about Rs 70, went back to his family in Madurai. What was left did not stretch far. He skipped meals routinely and got through days on tea. There were stretches when a coconut bun costing Rs 1.25 was beyond him.

Chennai, and thirteen years of almost nothing

In 1996, at 19, he left for Chennai to become an actor. He had no industry contacts and no route in, so he cleaned and painted for money and spent it on trying again.

The method was unglamorous. Hang around sets. Get your face known to assistant directors and unit managers. Wait.

What came were uncredited parts, junior artiste work, a second or two in the background of somebody else's scene, sometimes not visible at all. He turned up in uncredited comedy sequences in films including Maru Malarchi. The pay was negligible. The next morning it started over.

A parotta-eating competition changed everything

His breakthrough arrived in 2009 with Vennila Kabadi Kuzhu, a sports drama built around a kabaddi team. Soori had a supporting comic role, and one scene, a parotta-eating contest, landed with audiences in a way nobody had planned for.

It was funny because it was precisely timed, and it was precisely timed because the man performing it had spent more than a decade watching comedy get made from the edges of sets where nobody knew his name.

The nickname Parotta Soori stuck. So did the phone calls.

From 2009 he became one of the most in-demand comedians in Tamil cinema, running through Sundarapandian in 2012, Varuthapadatha Valibar Sangam and Pandiya Naadu in 2013, and Jilla in 2014 opposite Vijay and Mohanlal. His pairing with Sivakarthikeyan, which started on Varuthapadatha Valibar Sangam, became one of the industry's most reliable double acts and carried through films including Rajini Murugan in 2016.

Then in 2021, he appeared in Annatthe. Starring Rajinikanth. The fan had arrived on the same set as the reason he changed his name.

The transition almost nobody makes

Tamil comedians rarely become leading men. Soori did, and the person who made it happen was Vetrimaaran, who cast him as the lead in Viduthalai Part 1 in 2023.

Adapted from Jeyamohan's short fiction and set in 1980s Tamil Nadu, the film put him opposite Vijay Sethupathi as Kumaresan, a police constable pulled between duty and conscience. The reviews were strong and the performance was widely read as one of the best lead debuts Tamil cinema had produced in years. He returned to the character in Viduthalai Part 2 in 2024.

His next movie release

Mandaadi is his next release, directed by Mathimaran Pugazhendhi, who previously made Selfie and worked as an assistant to Vetrimaaran. It is a sports action drama set among Tamil Nadu's fishing communities, built around a long-distance sailboat race, and it was shot predominantly at sea.

The production was punishing. Filming wrapped in April 2026, and the makers have been open about cast and crew picking up injuries along the way. Soori did the high-risk sea work himself after months of training.

Telugu actor Suhas makes his Tamil debut alongside him, with Mahima Nambiar, Sathyaraj, Ravindra Vijay, Mithun Jai Shankar and Bala Saravanan in the cast. Elred Kumar produces under RS Infotainment, with Vetrimaaran as creative producer and GV Prakash Kumar on music. The film is certified UA and releases in Tamil and Telugu, with Netflix holding post-theatrical streaming rights.

It opens worldwide on 10 September 2026, a week after being moved from its originally announced 4 September date.