As Nitesh Tiwari’s two-part Ramayana prepares to open worldwide on November 5, 2026, one of its smaller but pointed roles is drawing attention for what it reveals about how the film was made. Kunal Kapoor, who plays Lord Indra, has detailed his first experience shooting large-scale action on a green screen, and named Hollywood movement coach Terry Notary as a decisive force behind the cast’s physical work.
Acting without a palace or a sunrise
Kapoor told SCREEN that the green screen offered no real environment to lean on. The actor had to hold the set, the light and the scale of the scene in his head. He said there was no real palace or sunrise; everything was out of his imagination, and pretty much everything had to be created in his head.
For Kapoor, that absence became a creative return rather than a limitation. He compared it to the imaginative play of childhood, where an empty room can stand in for a battlefield or a kingdom. In a film built on visual effects, imagination is not the fallback; it is the primary material.
Why Terry Notary mattered
The actor credited Terry Notary with giving that imaginative work a physical grammar. Notary has spent years teaching performers how to move before effects are layered on, with credits on the Planet of the Apes franchise, X2, Superman Returns, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer and the Russo brothers’ upcoming Avengers: Doomsday.
Kapoor drew a distinction that matters for big VFX productions: Notary approaches action as a body language expert, not merely a choreographer. That changes how a fight scene is built, because the movement has to carry story and character before the effects arrive.
What to take from the Ramayana unit
- Release timeline: Ramayana Part 1 opens worldwide on November 5, 2026; Part 2 has moved from Diwali 2027 to 2028.
- The cast: Ranbir Kapoor plays Rama, Sai Pallavi plays Sita, Yash plays Ravana, Sunny Deol plays Hanuman, Ravie Dubey plays Lakshman and Kunal Kapoor plays Indra.
- The craft lesson: On a visual-effects epic, the logic of a scene may be fixed in pre-production; what still has to be won on the day is believable physicality.
The bigger test
Producer Namit Malhotra has said the sequel, earlier planned for Diwali 2027, is now slated for 2028. That gives audiences a longer wait, but also gives the production more time to decide how much of the epic’s emotion can live in the performers rather than in the pixels.
For Hindi cinema, Ramayana is an attempt to run a mythological scale through a modern visual-effects pipeline. Kapoor’s account suggests the unit is trying to protect a human core inside that machinery: an actor’s imagination on one side, a movement coach’s eye on the other.
Source: The Times of India
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