Iniya & Thambi Ramaiah Movies Together List — 5 Films

The shape of the work

The 2010s account for 80% of everything they made together. The 2010s belonged to Vaagai Sooda Vaa; the 2020s to Sweety Naughty Crazy. Iniya acted in every film; Thambi Ramaiah acted in all of them. Strictly Tamil cinema — they never crossed industries together.

Partnership facts

• Iniya was just 14 when she first acted opposite Thambi Ramaiah in Vaagai Sooda Vaa (2011). He played her father. That film put both of them on the map — she won the National Award for Best Child Artist, and he became the go-to father figure in Tamil cinema.
• In Pottu (2019), Thambi Ramaiah deliberately slowed down his dialogue delivery to match Iniya's natural rhythm. He told the director he wanted her reactions to land first. That scene where she breaks down in front of him? Entirely improvised by her — he just stayed silent and let her take the lead.
• On the sets of Pulivaal (2014), Thambi Ramaiah would bring homemade snacks for Iniya every single day. She later said he treated her like his own daughter off-screen too — checking if she ate, if she was comfortable, even scolding her gently if she was distracted.
• Their father-daughter dynamic in Vaagai Sooda Vaa (2011) directly inspired director M. Manikandan to cast a real-life father-daughter pair in his later film Kadaisi Vivasayi (2022). He said in an interview that he wanted that same raw, unpolished bond.
• "She made me a better actor. I just had to react to her truth." — Thambi Ramaiah about Iniya, during a behind-the-scenes interview for Pottu (2019).
• In Sweety Naughty Crazy (2026), they flipped the script — for the first time, they play a couple, not father-daughter. Thambi Ramaiah reportedly told the director, 'I need to unlearn everything I did with her in the last three films.' The result is a completely new rhythm between them.