Tanikella Bharani & Raghu Babu Movies Together List — 33 Films

The shape of the work

The 2000s belonged to Classmates; the 2020s to Vidya Vasula Aham. Tanikella Bharani acted in every film; Raghu Babu acted in all of them. Strictly Telugu cinema — they never crossed industries together.

Partnership facts

• Their first film together, Kabaddi Kabaddi (2003), was a low-budget sports drama. Director Prem didn't have a big cast, so he pulled in character actors he trusted. Tanikella Bharani and Raghu Babu had never shared screen time before, but Prem bet on their natural rhythm — and it worked.
• In Classmates (2007), Tanikella Bharani played the strict lecturer and Raghu Babu the comic sidekick. The trick? Bharani would deliver his lines deadpan, then Raghu would break the tension with a quick improvised punchline. Director V. N. Aditya let them run with it — that push-pull became the film's most rewatchable scenes.
• Their 2005 hit Hungama (7.5/10) was a remake of the Malayalam film Mattupetti Machan. But the Telugu version became a sleeper hit largely because of their comic timing as bumbling sidekicks. That film directly led to more multi-star comedies in Telugu — like the 2007 trend of pairing two character actors for parallel comic tracks.
• On the sets of Current (2009), Raghu Babu would often ask Tanikella Bharani to read his lines aloud before a take — not because he didn't know them, but because he wanted to match Bharani's rhythm. Bharani, a trained stage actor, would slow down his delivery to help Raghu find the beat. They never talked about it publicly.
• Raghu Babu once said in a 2015 interview: 'Bharani garu is the only co-actor who can make me laugh even when I'm not in the scene. I'd be off-camera, and his dialogue delivery would crack me up. The director would yell 'cut' and I'd still be laughing.'