In April 2010, Linguswamy's "Paiyaa" released. A romantic road-trip film, featuring an album by Yuvan Shankar Raja, it was very successful. For the first time, he enacted a character that lives in an urban area. He said that he accepted the film because he desperately wanted to play a cool dude on screen. Karthi's performances in "Aayirathil Oruvan" and "Paiyaa" earned him further nominations at the 58th Filmfare Awards South in the Best Actor category. Both films were dubbed into Telugu as "Yuganiki Okkadu" and "Aawara", respectively, and were successful.