India — Anl Arasu Got His Stunt Name on a Suriya Set, and Only Found Out When He Read the Credits
- Anl Arasu is a Tamil stunt choreographer who won a National Award for his work on "Maharaja."
- He says the crew on Suriya's "Mounam Pesiyadhe" nicknamed him "Anl" because his fight work moved so fast.
- He only learned the name had stuck when he saw it printed in the film's credits.
Posted: October 21, 2026
Stunt choreographers in Tamil cinema are known by monikers rather than surnames — Super Subbarayan, Stunt Shiva, Jaguar Thangam — and Anl Arasu has now explained where his came from. Speaking to Galatta Plus, he traced it to his early years working under Peter Hein and Stunt Shiva, when he was composing fights at speed. On Suriya's Mounam Pesiyadhe, the crew started saying "Arasu compose panna anl parakudhu" — when Arasu composes a fight, it throws off a heat wave. He says he had no idea the nickname had been adopted formally until he saw himself credited as Anl Arasu on the finished film.
The detail matters more than it sounds. In an industry where the action department is often uncredited or credited collectively, a moniker is the thing that travels: it is how a fight master's work gets attributed across decades of pictures, and it is handed over by the crew rather than claimed. Arasu's came out of how fast he was building sequences on the floor.
He is the first winner of the National Award for Best Stunt Choreography for a Tamil film, for Maharaja (2024) — a category that only recently began naming the people who design the action. He has most recently worked on Vijay's Jana Nayagan and Ravi Teja's Irumudi.
Learn more on IMDb: Anl Arasu · Mounam Pesiyadhe (2002) · Maharaja (2024)
