Can’t believe now that I dared to impersonate MGR in Vaa Vaathiyar: Karthi

Vaa Vaathiyar, Nalan Kumarasamy’s second full-length feature film, is slated for December 12 release. The film stars newcomer Krithi Shetty as the female lead. The music is by Santhosh Narayanan.

Karthi said it was partly because of Kumarasamy that he accepted the “challenging role”.

Nalan Kumarasamy’s debut film Soodhu Kavvum, now considered a cult classic of modern Tamil cinema, brought out a hitherto unknown quirky side to Vijay Sethupathi, who played the lead. The film was widely praised for fresh writing, dark humour and satire on politics and crime.

Accepting the role was the beginning of his journey into “understanding” the legend that M G Ramachandran was, said Karthi.

The actor said he knew MGR was an era-defining figure in cinema and politics, but the unconditional bond between him and his fans, even decades after his death, gave him “goosebumps” and showed him how big a personality MGR actually was.

“Every day we discovered something new about him. I literally got goosebumps at times when I heard the stories,” he said.

Once they got a fair idea of the character of MGR, they worked for weeks on rehearsals, make-up and costumes to get the body language and the look right without it becoming mere mimicry, the actor said.

In Vaa Vaathiyar, they have created a kind of “parallel world” around the MGR-devotee character, Nalan Kumarasamy said.

The film is anchored around a man whose life is shaped by his obsession for MGR.

According to the cast and crew, Vaa Vaathiyar is about a fun-loving, rule-bending cop, who was raised by his MGR-obsessed grandfather almost like MGR. The twist in the tale comes when grandson’s choices clash with the grandfather’s idealised MGR image.

Nalan Kumarasamy said working on this film was like going through a “sugarcane juice extractor machine”.

“I was not a fan of MGR when I began this film, I just wanted a character that people could be obsessed with. But as I began getting into it more and more, I became an admirer of him,” the director admitted.

Actor Sathyaraj said that as a die-hard MGR fan, he could vouch for the “authenticity” of how MGR is portrayed on screen. At the pre-release event, he even launched into an impromptu quiz, reciting MGR’s dialogues and challenging the audience to name the films.

“I think, between Kumarasamy and Karthi, they pulled it off,” the veteran actor, who is playing an important character in Vaa Vaathiyar, said.