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5 min readHyderabadMay 9, 2026 07:41 PM IST
Before becoming one of Telugu cinema's biggest stars with Pelli Choopulu and Arjun Reddy, Vijay Deverakonda had a minor antagonist role in Sekhar Kammula's ensemble drama Life is Beautiful (Credit: @thedeverakonda/ Instagram)
If you watch Life is Beautiful today, knowing what you know about Vijay Deverakonda, there is a kind of dissonance that settles in. The man who became Telugu cinema’s most talked-about leading actor of his generation is somewhere in that film, playing a character on the wrong side of the story with a brief screen time. The role asks very little of him. And when his scenes are done, the film moves on without looking back. That was 2012. Pelli Choopulu was still four years away. Arjun Reddy was five.
Where he was coming from
After college, his first film came in 2011. Director Ravi Babu cast him in Nuvvila, a multi-strand romantic comedy that introduced 6 new faces to Telugu Cinema, including Yami Gautam. The film was produced by Ramoji Rao, where Vijay Deverakonda played the role of Vishnu, a cricketer. The film did not make enough of an impression to bring attention to its cast, and he moved forward without much to show for it beyond the experience of having been on a film set. A year later, he was on Sekhar Kammula’s Life is Beautiful.
The film and its cast
Life is Beautiful released on in 2012, where director Sekhar Kammula built the film around five newcomers in the lead roles, with Shriya Saran, Amala Akkineni, and Anjala Zaveri in supporting parts. The story is set in a working-class neighbourhood in Hyderabad, tracing the lives of a group of young people managing friendship, family pressure, and the slow business of figuring out who they are. It carried the warmth and neighbourhood texture that Kammula had established with Happy Days.
Vijay Deverakonda with the cast of Sekhar Kammula’s Life is Beautiful (Photo: Indiaglitz)
What makes the film genuinely interesting to look back on now is who else was in it. Naveen Polishetty and Sree Vishnu had roles in the film . So were Sreemukhi, Eesha Rebba, and Chandini Chowdary. Nag Ashwin, who would go on to direct the science-fiction epic Kalki 2898 AD, appeared in a small on-screen part while serving as an assistant director on the film. The supporting cast of Life is Beautiful, in hindsight, reads like an early gathering of people Telugu cinema would spend the next decade paying attention to.
Vijay Deverakonda and Naveen Polishetty were both placed on the antagonist side of the story. They played the kind of wealthy, trouble-making young men whose function in films like this is to create friction for the protagonists and then step aside. Neither role was written with room to breathe. Audiences who have revisited the film in recent years note, with some amusement, how odd it is to watch both of them as the villains, given everything that followed.
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The meeting that opened the door
The most important thing that happened to Vijay Deverakonda on those sets was not the character he played, it was who he met there . Nag Ashwin, then working as Sekhar Kammula’s assistant director, crossed paths with Vijay Deverakonda during the shoot. That introduction, made possible entirely by a minor antagonist role in a neighbourhood coming-of-age drama, led to Ashwin casting him in Yevade Subramanyam in 2015.
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In Yevade Subramanyam, Deverakonda played Rishi in a supporting role opposite Nani. It was the first time Telugu audiences had a proper look at what he was capable of. The performance earned him a Special Jury Award at the Nandi Awards in 2017. From there, Tharun Bhascker cast him in the lead of Pelli Choopulu in 2016, a film that took the National Award for Best Feature Film in Telugu. This was followed by Arjun Reddy in 2017, directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga, a film that made him a phenomenon in Telugu cinema.
An official poster of Pelli Choopulu, starring Vijay Deverakonda and Ritu Varma
By the time Arjun Reddy turned Deverakonda into a name that transcended the Telugu film industry, the early years had been largely set aside. The story that travelled was about a young man who came from nowhere and rewrote what a Telugu leading man could be. Raw, unpolished, willing to go places the industry had long considered off-limits.
That is the part of the story Life is Beautiful actually contains. Not the character he played, but what showing up for that character made possible.
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