Madhavan on how his attempt to copy Rajinikanth ruined a studio: ‘Big slap on my face’

Taking that advice seriously, Madhavan signed a film that he believed fit the expectations being laid out for him. Recalling the experience, he said, “So I accepted a film where I was playing a guy who was struggling to feed himself, who was weak, uneducated, not studying, but who had a dream of becoming a cricketer. That was the film I was doing. The film flopped so badly that the whole studio closed down after that.”

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‘A big slap on my face’

The setback, however, became an important learning moment for the actor. Reflecting on what the failure taught him, Madhavan said, “So I suddenly realised that I should never become what I’ve now started calling, in Hindi, data ke tattu, which means idiots who do not know how to interpret data. Everybody has data. Your interpretation of that data, and the inferences you draw from those interpretations, will determine how successful you are.”

He explained that while the advice he received was not entirely wrong, his mistake was in following it too literally. “So while everything they were telling me was true, what I had to do was not that. I had to interpret the data separately and make my own kind of B and C centre films. That film taught me tremendously, with a big slap on my face, what I needed to do next.”