Nassar & Mukesh Rishi Movies Together List — 6 Films

The shape of the work

The 2010s account for 83% of everything they made together. The 2000s belonged to Simhadri; the 2010s to Rajanna. Nassar acted in every film; Mukesh Rishi acted in all of them. Strictly Telugu cinema — they never crossed industries together.

Partnership facts

• Nassar and Mukesh Rishi first shared screen space in Rachcha (2012), but they didn't share a single scene. The director Sampath Nandi later admitted he cast them as two separate villains because he wanted 'two different kinds of menace' — one cold (Nassar) and one loud (Rishi).
• In Baadshah (2013), their only face-to-face confrontation was a 3-minute scene where Nassar's character calmly negotiates while Mukesh Rishi's character keeps shouting. Rishi later told a fan that Nassar deliberately lowered his volume mid-scene to force Rishi to modulate his own voice — a trick Rishi said he 'stole' for later roles.
• Their pairing in Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy (2019) — where Nassar played the British officer and Rishi played a loyalist soldier — directly inspired the casting of a similar 'oppressor vs enforcer' duo in the 2022 Telugu film Sita Ramam. The director of Sita Ramam confirmed in an interview that he wanted 'that same tension' between the two actors.
• On the sets of Maharshi (2019), Nassar and Rishi shared a vanity van — not because of budget cuts, but because Rishi requested it. He told the production team that Nassar 'talks like a professor' and he wanted to soak up his stories between shots. They ended up recording a 40-minute conversation about old Telugu theatre that the crew still talks about.
• Mukesh Rishi, in a 2020 YouTube interview: 'Nassar sir is the only co-star who made me forget my lines. Not because he was intimidating — because I was too busy watching him act. I would just stand there and enjoy the show.'