Tanikella Bharani & Sarath Babu Movies Together List — 6 Films

The shape of the work

The 1990s belonged to Bobbili Simham; the 2020s to Entha Manchivaadavuraa. Tanikella Bharani acted in every film; Sarath Babu acted in all of them. Strictly Telugu cinema — they never crossed industries together.

Partnership facts

• They first shared screen space in Bobbili Simham (1994) because director K. Raghavendra Rao needed a calm, authoritative presence to balance Venkatesh’s explosive hero. Sarath Babu was the first choice for the villain role, but he insisted on bringing in Tanikella Bharani for the comic sidekick part — he had seen Bharani’s stage work and told Rao, “He’ll make my scenes sharper.”
• In Missamma (2003), Sarath Babu played the strict father while Tanikella Bharani played the bumbling uncle. The trick was that Bharani would deliberately flub his lines in the first take to make Sarath Babu laugh — and Sarath Babu, known for his deadpan discipline, would then channel that irritation into a more intense performance. The director kept those first takes because the anger looked real.
• Their only hit together, Entha Manchivaadavuraa (2020), directly launched the career of director Satish Vegesna. Before this film, Vegesna was an assistant who had never helmed a feature. Both actors agreed to work with a first-time director only because the other had signed on first — Sarath Babu said yes after hearing Bharani was already cast.
• On the sets of Shirdi Sai (2012), the two developed a ritual: every morning before makeup, they would sit together and recite one verse from the Sri Sai Satcharitra. Neither was particularly religious before the film, but they kept doing it even after the shoot ended — Sarath Babu later said it was the only way they could stay calm during Nagarjuna’s long monologue scenes.
• Tanikella Bharani once said in a 2021 interview: “Sarath and I never rehearsed together. We’d just look at each other’s eyes and know who would speak first. That’s why our scenes in Sisindri (1995) feel like a real argument — because we were actually surprising each other.”