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Passionate Thampi Antony looking at a photo of himelf in the movie, ‘Calcutta News’, in a magazine from Calcutta.

Thampi was on the set of Calcutta News in Thripunithura. He is producing the film.

Sean Bean plays the lead, the actor who was in ’Lord of the Rings’ and was the baddie who battled Brosnan in ’Golden Eye’. Steven Milburn Anderson directs the movie. He has also written the script of ’Root of all Evil’. Anderson was the director of Oliver Stone’s South ’Central.’ Australian actor Chris Hemsworth (‘Kidnapped’) and Victoria Profeta (‘The Drew Carey Show’) co-star in the movie.

Playing the role of a sardarji in ‘The Root of all Evil’, a Hollywood movie, with the lead character, Sean Bean.

‘The root of all Evil’, has just started shooting in Chicago and he plays a cameo role of a sardarji. His name in the film is Bahadurjit Jateendrapreet Singh. “Singh has this store called ‘9 to 9’ and he turns out to be a suspect in a robbery case only because he has bought a new car. Why? When the sleuths were out looking for the thieves who decamped with a fortune, they thought of what people do with sudden riches. First, they buy a car.

So they zeroed in on people who bought new cars. Singh had and that’s how he became a suspect. It is scheduled to be released in 2008,” says Thampi, who is also part of the production team.

In Hollywood film making, the producer actually does the role of the executive producer over here. The funds come from elsewhere, it is not the producer’s money. The producers form a company to do all the work related to moviemaking and another company finances the movie, Thampi explains.

Thampi has always been infatuated with stage, right from his student days in the Engineering College, Kothamangalam where he did his civil engineering. He went on to do architecture, but lived on films as his staple diet. He has lived in the US for 24 years now, with his wife, Prema Thekkek. The couple runs a chain of ‘long term’ care homes or health centres where the sick and the aged are looked after. “In the States, my friends and I have put up Malayalam plays, he says. In Palunku, he acted as a poet. In Calcutta News, he plays the role of a psychiatrist. This movie has been largely shot in Calcutta. They have plans to have Calcutta News dubbed in Bengali, as it concerns the life of people living there too. Moreover, the title song is in Bengali.

In ‘Beyond the Soul’, a movie which Rajeev Anchal directed and he produced, (2005) Thampi played the role of an ayurvedic physician. This fetched him the best actor award at the Honolulu International Film Festival, he remembered. The association with Rajeev Anchal resulted in another movie called Made in USA, in which Madhavan starred. Thampi, who was a good basketball player in his college days, dabbles in poetry too, some of which have been published. He is Babu Antony’s brother, for those who do not know. One look at him and you are likely to see the resemblance.

Though Thampi lives beyond the seven seas, the names of his three children take him back to the Kerala clime: Nadi, Sandhya, Kaayal.

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