Ahead of the release of Shankar’s Indian 2, the actor shares his experience working with Kamal Haasan, his admiration for Shankar’s movies, and why he stopped being vocal on Twitter
Edited excerpts:
Observations about Kamal Haasan’s process.
Kamal sir is my favourite actor. Admiring and loving as an actor from afar… has been my whole life. I consider him my teacher because he has always been at the back of my head. Now, when you are going to work with him, I went in expecting someone who is going to teach me a lot, but what I found is a student who is still learning a lot. Kamal sir is so curious. He is learning a new thing every day, constantly adapting.
First memory of watching Indian.
I saw it many times in the theatre. Before that, I saw Gentleman on the first day of the first show. I can tell you that those days were better days for cinema because the biggest film of the year was not always the most expensive film of the year — or the most marketed. The biggest film was the one that people genuinely loved the most. So Gentleman was that year’s most beloved film for me. The same thing happened with Kadhalan. And then when it came to Indian, anyway I saw all the Kamal Haasan films on the first day, this now was a thing where I was Shankar’s films on the first day. And what Shankar brought to cinema was this way of going beyond the imagination of the common man. He blew their minds because he literally expanded their visions. My most memorable viewing of Indian was in Prarthana (Chennai). I remember that that night, it made me very angry as a young boy — I was an adolescent, then — about how helpless I was about the system. We had only heard about freedom struggles and all that but in the contemporary world, Indian created that need in me.
Now that you’re no longer on Twitter, do you no longer miss the ability to vent?
I’ve lost a lot in the last ten years. I’ve been talking my mind for the last 25-30 years. But the last ten years have been particularly harsh. It was getting a bit tiring and a bit lonely. And when I was the only person speaking in the entire fraternity, people used to ask me why I was the only one doing that, and now they ask me why I’m not talking anymore. Why am I the only person under scrutiny? I’ll do what all my peers are doing, which is focusing on my job, and being a film actor isn’t an easy profession. Every day is uncertain, and you have a long way to go. I think I just got tired of being disliked, for being a truth-seeker. I don’t want to be an actor that people reject before I start performing. I want them to judge me for my craft, not because of whether they like me in real life. That’s why for the last twenty-two years, I’ve kept my real life to myself.
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