Akkineni Nagarjuna is approaching a remarkable milestone, his 100th film, as he marks four decades in Indian cinema.

The son of legendary actor Akkineni Nageswara Rao, Nagarjuna built his own formidable career from the ground up, with landmark films like Mani Ratnam's Gitanjali (1989) and Ram Gopal Varma's Shiva (1989) serving as the twin pillars that defined his early identity as an actor.

He credits a broader cultural shift around 1988–89, when younger South Indian audiences were actively seeking a departure from conventional filmmaking, as the wave he was fortunate enough to ride early.

Beyond action and romance, his devotional epics Annamaya and Sri Ramadasu proved to be deeply personal turning points, productions he describes as spiritual awakenings that reconnected Telugu audiences with a genre absent from screens since the 1950s and 60s.

Across four decades and multiple Indian film industries, Nagarjuna has held firm to one conviction: stories rooted in Indian culture, sentiment, and emotion are the ones that endure.

He dismisses the allure of foreign locations and Western sensibilities as passing trends, and attributes Telugu cinema's recent global breakthroughs, through Baahubali, RRR, Pushpa, and Kalki, not to a reinvention of ambition, but to technology finally catching up with a larger-than-life storytelling sensibility that was always there.

On legacy, he is equally measured, noting that while he takes pride in upholding his father's reputation, his sons, Naga Chaitanya and Akhil Akkineni, must earn their own standing with audiences independently. "It's for the people to decide," he says. "We just have to try."

At this stage of his career, Nagarjuna has deliberately widened his creative scope, pursuing diverse and experimental roles rather than anchoring himself strictly to leading-man status.

His upcoming projects reflect this range, a former CBI officer in Sekhar Kammula's Kuberaa opposite Dhanush, and a villainous turn opposite Rajinikanth in Lokesh Kanagaraj's Coolie. His 100th film, tentatively titled King 100, is currently 45% complete.

Directed by Ra Karthik, it centres on a father-daughter drama with a rags-to-riches arc, employing de-aging technology to depict his character from age 25 to 60, with Tabu among the confirmed cast.

Away from the screen, he continues to lead Annapurna Studios, recently launching a state-of-the-art motion capture facility already utilised by S.S. Rajamouli for Varanasi.

As for what comes after the centenary milestone, Nagarjuna is unmoved by the framing: "There is no next phase. I never thought of it like that."