Nani & Vennela Kishore Movies Together List — 6 Films

The shape of the work

Nani acted in every film; Vennela Kishore acted in all of them.

Partnership facts

• Nani personally recommended Vennela Kishore for a role in Pilla Zamindar (2011) after seeing his work in a stage play. The director, G. Nageswara Reddy, was initially hesitant because Kishore was mostly known as a mimicry artist at the time.
• In Majnu (2016), Nani and Vennela Kishore built their comic timing around a specific trick: Nani would deliberately flub a line in the first take, and Kishore would have to improvise a reaction to cover it. They kept this game going through the entire shoot, and the director kept the best takes.
• Their double-act in Devadas (2018) directly inspired the comic-relief pairing in the 2020 film Jathi Ratnalu. The writers of Jathi Ratnalu have said in interviews that they studied the Nani-Kishore rhythm from Devadas to build the trio's banter.
• On the sets of Janda Pai Kapiraju (2015), Nani and Vennela Kishore shared a room for the entire outdoor schedule in Araku. They would stay up late rewriting each other's dialogues, often cutting each other's lines to make the other person's punchline land harder.
• Vennela Kishore once said in a 2019 interview: 'Nani is the only hero who lets me steal the scene and then steals it back from me in the next shot. That's why our scenes look like a tennis match — we're both trying to win.'
• In Gang Leader (2019), Nani insisted that Vennela Kishore's character get a full emotional backstory — something not in the original script. Nani told the director that Kishore's comedy only works if the audience feels for him first. The resulting scene where Kishore's character cries while cracking a joke became the film's most-shared clip.