JIP Special
Wanakkam – A Chennai double bill : Arnold Schwarzenegger charms Jayalalithaa, curry stings Stephen Fry. Multi-billion $ hit Hollywood actor and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and British comedian and author Stephen Frywere played Close Encounters of Chennai Kind giving the city a double barrel blast of star power. (Recall all time global hit Predator, Terminator, Commando, Total Recall, True Lies, Last action hero, Conan The Barbarian, Terminator 2, Terminator 3…all all-time hit).
The Governator, in town to attend the audio launch of Vikram-starrer ‘I’, met chief minister J Jayalalithaa at the state secretariat in the afternoon. An hour after their 20-minute meeting, the actor posted pictures of himself with the chief minister on his Instagram account, writing: “It was fantastic to sit down with Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa before our event tonight and talk about her state’s success and challenges. That’s the advantage of being an actor who was also a Governor!”
“How do you beat jet lag? Getting pumped up before I go to the red carpet of the “I” audio launch in Chennai, India,” he posted, before attending the audio launch of the movie directed by Shankar, and stars Amy Jackson, Suresh Gopi and Upen Patel later in the evening, where he shared the stage with superstar Rajinikanth and A R Rahman.
Funnyman Fry, in Chennai to film ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’, a biopic of the Indian mathematician genius Srinivasa Ramanujan with Dev Patel playing the lead role, on Monday tweeted his impressions of the city: “Having fun filming ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’. Dev Patel, v nice guy, playing Ramanujan. Curries are hot here in Chennai *gasp*”
“Waitrose doing well in Chennai, I see…” he tweeted, posting a photograph of a city outlet of the British supermarket chain. Then, with typically wry humour, he posted a picture he’d taken of a Chennai corporation signboard that said ‘Save Rain Water’ and ‘Wear Helmet’ and tweeted, “I don’t quite see the logic of this.”
This is not the first time that big stars have descended on Chennai. Actor Jackie Chan visited the city in 2008 for the audio release of Kamal Haasan’s ‘Dasavatharam’ and Hollywood producer Barrie M Osborne of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fame visited the city in 2012 for a Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s Media and Entertainment business conclave.