Parvathy Thiruvoth on her first Malayalam cop role and the people who keep her grounded

As Parvathy Thiruvoth approaches two decades in cinema, the actor continues to take on varied roles while remaining vocal about issues she believes in. In Shahad Nilambur's ‘Prathama Drishtya Kuttakkar’, she plays a police officer for the first time in a Malayalam film, a role that came to her at a time when she was already questioning what justice means.

Interestingly, another police role had been offered to her three or four months earlier, but she could not take it up. “It was at a time when I was confused about what justice really means that these two films came my way. ‘Prathama Drishtya Kuttakkar’ worked for me, and that’s how I decided to do it,” she says.

The actor admits that she still does not have a clear answer to what justice means in the country. While there are legal systems and law enforcement agencies in place, she questions whether they always succeed in delivering justice. Her views are shaped by experiences she and her colleagues have gone through, including watching people spend years seeking justice while their lives are consumed by the process.

Playing a police officer, however, was never an ambition for Parvathy. She had previously portrayed a senior police officer in a Telugu series, Dhootha, but this is her first such role in Malayalam. What attracted her to Shahad’s film was not simply the uniform, but the woman behind it.

“Shahad hasn’t written this as merely a police character. What mattered more was the woman behind the uniform, who she is and the circumstances she has lived through,” she says. Two decades in the industry have also taught Parvathy to separate her work from the noise surrounding it. Trolling, criticism and scrutiny over everything from what an actor wears to what they say can be exhausting, she says. For her, the answer is to hold on to the value she finds in acting.

“Acting is a job,” she says. At the same time, she describes it as an “emotional time-travel machine” that allows her to enter another era and inhabit a world that does not exist. Seeing acting as something magical, she believes, is what allows her to remain connected to it. Otherwise, it can become something that simply drains her.

Her strongest anchor outside cinema remains her parents. Their unconditional love, she says, has helped her remember that her life is bigger than public opinion, awards or professional success.
“My parents are the two people who prove that my life has value even if I were simply living without achieving anything,” she says. Even if she had chosen another profession and never become an actor or social activist, she believes they would have accepted her just the same.

They may misunderstand her at times or fail to completely understand her choices, she says, but their love remains constant. “I consider myself lucky because not everyone gets that.”
For years, Parvathy kept her parents away from the public glare because she wanted to protect them from the hostility she herself faced. She could deal with the threats and even death threats directed at her, but did not want her parents subjected to the same treatment.

Eventually, she realised that keeping them away from the celebrations they deserved meant allowing that fear to dictate her life. “If I keep them away from the celebrations they deserve because of that fear, then I am surrendering to the fear. The fear is winning,” she says.

Today, she cannot imagine celebrating her achievements without them. All her awards are kept at her family home rather than at her own house. Her father has built a shelf for the trophies and even arranged the lighting around it. “That is my father’s happy place,” she says. For Parvathy, perhaps that is where the meaning of all those awards lies. They recognise the actor the world sees, but the people who celebrate them with her are the ones who knew her long before the accolades.