3 min readMumbaiJun 9, 2026 06:27 PM IST
Madhavan, who is currently riding high on the success of the spy thriller franchise Dhurandhar, once opened up about the early days of his career and the advice he received after his debut film Alai Payuthey. The actor recalled being told that if he wanted to become a superstar on the scale of Rajinikanth, he needed to make films that resonated with audiences in smaller towns and villages.
‘You cannot be Rajinikanth until….’
Speaking to Brut India, Madhavan said, “So the people who were coming to me were saying, “You cannot be Rajinikanth till you do films that work in the B and C centres. The villages have to accept you. Only when they call you Thalaiva will you become a South superstar. So obviously, I was getting all this data which was telling me: do films for the villages, behave like somebody from the villages, and stuff like that.”
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.”
