Dulquer Salmaan: Don’t know if even a great script will convince Dad to do a film with me

Dulquer Salmaan has already created an identity for himself despite being the son of legendary Malayalam superstar Mammootty.

At an interaction ahead of the release of his Hindi debut Karwaan with Irrfan Khan and Mithila Palkar, Dulquer Salmaan said his parents had deliberately kept him away from the stardom of his father while growing up.

“We grew up in Chennai," Dulquer said. "That was a deliberate move by my parents to keep us away from [the Malayalam film industry]. He is a bigger star in Malayalam.”

When it was pointed out that Mammootty became quite popular in Tamil Nadu as well after Mani Ratnam's Thalapathi (1991), Dulquer laughed, “So, I don’t know how much that plan [of my parents] worked. We moved there and two-three years later Thalapathi and all those movies came and he was equally well known. But I feel in Chennai there wasn’t too much attention. So, I had a pretty normal upbringing.”

Dulquer said that as a child he was never in awe of his father’s star status: “After going to Kerala and visiting his sets, you just see a lot of love for him. There is a lot of attention. But I don’t know if I invested too much time thinking about that. I don’t think I had any special treatment at school, because that was how my school was. I don’t think my parents ever treated me differently.”

Considering that he too is a popular star now in the South, what are the chances of him and Mammootty acting in a film together? "I don’t think there is a possibility because that is what gives me a different identity," Dulquer said. "Besides this news value like, ‘Hey, they are coming together in a film’, I don’t know how many original great scripts are there that can bring us together. I don’t even know if that [a great script] will convince him!”