Lother is the kind of boy who would take his cousins to a restaurant – all of them pre-teens – and tell them, you can have anything you want, I have got 20 bucks with me. You have got to love him. People have not forgotten him even 35 long years after his first and only appearance in a film called Manu Uncle, a cosy, fun Malayalam children's movie of the late 80s. The kid playing this character grew older of course, but even now, people recognise him as Lother from Manu Uncle, though he made his second appearance in Saudi Vellakka, his first as a grownup, last year.
Kuriachan Chacko is the opposite of all that you may picture old Lother to be. In a serious voice, he talks of his audition for Manu Uncle, adding that back then they did not use the word audition. "My parents answered a newspaper ad that said they were looking for child actors, and there, I had an interview of sorts, where I was asked to perform some acts. [Late] Dennis Joseph uncle, the director, and others were there," Kuriachan tells TNM in an interview. He is in Kochi now, working as a businessman, and says he has little to do with films.
Kuriachan was in Class 8 when he acted in Manu Uncle, as the oldest among four children who go on little adventures and end up in all sorts of trouble. Mammootty played the titular Manu Uncle to these kids. The film had Mohanlal in a beard playing a cameo. Even Suresh Gopi had a role in it, untypically playing a funny cop – the kind who steps out of a boat thinking it is land ahead and falls into the water. "Suresh Gopi was at the time not yet a superstar. But Mammootty and Mohanlal were already stars. Back then I had little idea about all of this though," Kuriachan says.
Kuriachan in Saudi Vellakka
In Manu Uncle is a witty sequence of the kids encountering Mohanlal in a restaurant thinking he is a thief (they don’t recognise him with a cap, sunglasses, and a beard covering half his face). Lother is the one who calls him a thief to his face and later asks authoritatively for an autograph when he realises it is Mohanlal. "Come here, I will give you an autograph! The first thing you call me is a thief!" Mohanlal says, catching Lother's collar with mock anger. And then again, Lother is the one who tricks his "scientist" uncle Manu into thinking he has spotted an alien by waving a cockroach before the lens of his telescope.
"I realised only much later how big these actors were. In those days, there were no caravans or separate rooms for anyone. Everyone would sit around in chairs, eat, and laugh together. Everything would be open and there was a lot of bonding," Kuriachan says.
Lother is also not the real name of his character, just what the kids call him in allusion to the Mandrake comics, knowing that he really likes The Phantom. "I fight like The Phantom," he claims throughout the film.
Watch: Song from Manu Uncle
But Kuriachan had never been big on acting, he was just in that one film because his parents answered an ad and he got selected. Neither did he try to get into another film for all these years, nor was he able to keep in touch with the other child actors in the film until recently, when a Youtube channel called Clap In Studio brought all of them together for an interview. "There was no internet or mobile phone in those days, and we all got busy with our studies and exams. Some of us moved to other places. But during that interview, I got to talk to some of the others. [Manu Uncle co-actors] Anoop is in the US, Sandeep in Bengaluru, and Sonia in Chennai," he says.
It is also following the interview that he got called for his second film Saudi Vellakka, as a judge. Director Tharun Moorthy was very insistent that Kuriachan played the role. "I told him it would be difficult after so many years to try acting now. But he was able to persuade me," Kuriachan says. He is not sure if he will act again, but he is open to considering it, Kuriachan adds.