Exclusive: Kangana Ranaut beats Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Vidya Balan to land Jayalalithaa's role in her biopic

By Rahul Raut

on March 22, 2019

Kangana Ranaut who played Rani Lakshmibai in the recently released Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi has bagged one more biopic in her kitty. The actress who's currently shooting for Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari's sports drama Panga is going to announce her new film tomorrow and we have all the details.

Peepingmoon.com has exclusively learned that Kangana will star in the biopic of Tamil Nadu's former chief minister and actress, J. Jayalalithaa. Titled Thalaivi, the film will be helmed by Tamil director A.L. Vijay while Baahubali writer Vijayendra Prasad who had also written Kangana's last biographical film has penned the script. Vishnu Induri who's making his big Bollywood debut with Kabir Khan's next film based on India's 1983 Cricket World Cup victory is bankrolling the project.

Kangana Ranaut

"Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Vidya Balan and Kangana Ranaut were in competition for this role. Since the film will have two looks of Jayalalithaa Ji (one for her younger days and another for her political career), the director wanted the actress to be a little thin who can make the body changeover. It would have been difficult for Aishwarya and Vidya for the required body transformation and hence Kangana was locked to play this respective role that any actress would vie to play," a source close to the project informed us.

Vidya Balan and Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

The film will apparently be made on a huge scale with over 100 crore estimated budget. It will be a trilingual (Tamil, Telugu and Hindi) and will have prominent names from Hindi and South film industry gracing the cast. The director, our sources say, has done about six months of research for the project and has met a lot of people who've worked with Jayalalithaa to narrate her story authentically.

The film goes on floors in June and will release early 2020.