Vijay Deverakonda Reveals Why He Removed His “The” Tag

While many heroes choose some “star” tag as their name’s prefix, Vijay Deverakonda chose “The” as his tag. However, he faced more negativity since he started using it, and eventually, he decided to drop it. In the recent posters of his upcoming film Kingdom, his name is mentioned without the “The” tag.

In a recent interview, Vijay also revealed why he decided to remove the tag. He said that the crazy amount of backlash made him remove his tag. “Interestingly, no other person ever received backlash for something like that. You can have any name, from Universal Star to People’s Star, and people younger than me, older than me, those who debuted before me, everyone has a tagline. I was probably the only one without one. Nobody else gets backlash,” Vijay said.

He said that during the promotions of Liger, his team asked him to add a tag before his name. He said that he resisted for a long time because he wanted people to know him just by his name. However, media articles started calling him with different names like “Southern Sensation”, “Rowdy Boy” and “Rowdy Star. For those reasons and due to the pressure from his team, Vijay decided to put “The” before his name. However, this tag received more criticism which neither Vijay nor his team expected. So, he decided to remove it and stick to his decision of having just his name and nothing else.

Directed by Gautam Tinnanuri, Kingdom will have its worldwide theatrical release on July 31. Bhagyashri Bhorse played the female lead in this action drama. Anirudh Ravichander composed the music for it.