Akhil Akkineni with his grandfather Akkineni Nageswara Rao (Photo: Idlebrainjeevi/ X)Long before Lenin made him the talk of Telugu cinema, a teenage Akhil Akkineni sat beside his parents Nagarjuna and Amala and his older brother Naga Chaitanya and made a confession that got everyone laughing. He was scared of his grandfather. Not because of any strictness in the traditional sense, but because of the one thing Akkineni Nageswara Rao took very seriously: the Telugu language.“I’m scared of my grandfather because whenever I speak in Telugu, he finds my sentences faulty to the core,” a visibly sheepish Akhil Akkineni said. “I only speak in English with my grandfather, while I speak in Telugu with my family.”The comment drew laughter from the rest of the family, but it also said something quietly significant about the household Akhil grew up in. ANR, who acted in over 255 films across a career that stretched from the 1940s to 2014, was known for his deep respect for the Telugu language and its nuances. He was a man who came from theatre, where diction and pronunciation were not details but the foundation of performance. That the same man would correct his teenage grandson’s Telugu at home was entirely in character.Akhil Akkineni, born in San Jose, California, and raised partly in Hyderabad, grew up in a household where English was the more natural language of daily conversation. His mother Amala, who has Bengali and Irish roots, has spoken publicly about not being fluent in Telugu herself. So for Akhil Akkineni, the language was something he understood and spoke within the family but never with the precision that his grandfather demanded. The solution, as any teenager would find, was simple: just switch to English around the old man.Also Read: ‘I needed people to respect me as an actor’: Akhil Akkineni on why Lenin had to workANR died on January 22, 2014, just months before the release of Manam, the film that brought three generations of Akkineni actors together on screen for the first and last time. Akhil Akkineni had a cameo in the film’s climax, a moment he later described as “nervous and exciting.” It was the last time he shared screen space with his grandfather.In the years that followed, Akhil Akkineni’s career struggled to find its footing. His debut film Akhil in 2015 underperformed. Hello, Mr. Majnu and Agent all fell short of expectations. Expectations around the Akkineni surname only grew after a string of underperformers, putting added pressure on the younger actor.Story continues below this adThen came Lenin. A rural action drama set in the Rayalaseema region, directed by Murali Kishor Abburu, the film required Akhil to speak in an authentic Rayalaseema dialect, transform his body language and shed every trace of the urban, English-speaking image he had carried through his earlier films. The boy who once avoided speaking Telugu in front of his grandfather delivered his career-best performance in a film rooted entirely in the language and the land ANR came from. The film crossed Rs 25 crore India net in its opening weekend, making it comfortably the biggest hit of Akhil Akkineni’s career.In a recent interview with SCREEN after the film’s success, Akhil Akkineni spoke about the conscious decision to go back to his roots. “I felt the urban scripts that we were choosing were taking me very far away. And I felt it was really needed to first connect to where we came from, where the roots are from,” he said.