Chennai, India – Twenty years into their marriage, actor Suriya maintains that his wife, Jyotika, is a better actor than him, pointing to her remarkable ability to access real emotion on demand. In an exclusive joint interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, Suriya described the couple’s fundamentally different approaches to performance, placing Jyotika’s instinctive style above his own more layered process. He confessed that while he struggles to emote in languages outside his mother tongue, Jyotika has mastered the art across multiple languages.
“I might do a lot of layering… first take, second take, and then I add something, implant something. A lot of things happen. I go back to my memory, past experiences, and try to use that to be in that mode,” Suriya explained. In contrast, Jyotika, he said, “can be immediately in that (necessary) mode.” He recalled a moment during the COVID-19 lockdown when Jyotika’s brother gave them a page of dialogue for a home screen test. “She brought real tears to the scene in one take. I remember thinking, ‘I’m not ready for this…'” he said.
Suriya highlighted the specific challenge of working in a language that is not one’s mother tongue and still being able to access genuine emotion. While he finds this difficult when doing Hindi films, he praised Jyotika for acing it. “She’s multitasking; talking in another language which is not her mother tongue, and still able to bring true emotions in front of the camera,” he said. He noted that her intensity and sensitivity in real life are evident in her performances, and that she can “totally surrender to that moment.” Jyotika was last seen in the streaming series System (2026), while Suriya’s recent release, Karuppu, collected ₹300 crore globally. The full interview is available on THR India’s YouTube channel.
