Vikram is all concentration as he gets ready for a photo-session. He peers into a little mirror balanced on the table as he, with the help of an assistant, painstakingly sticks square bits of paper with letters of the Tamil alphabet on them, all over his face. As he turns to look at you, his face reads `Pithamagan’ in Tamil, again and again and again.
Face to face with this new star that has taken time to rise over the Tamil firmament, and you know that success hasn’t gone to his head. Not really. He’s being just himself, the actor who watched the drama on the stages of Kollywood from the sidelines, waiting albeit patiently, for this one great big break.
It was a patience that paid off, with the one big break that was Sethu. The unusual role of the passionate young man thwarted in love with not your usual rosy ending, Sethu lit up the bright lights of the marquee for Vikram, with his title name `Chian’. “I waited in the wings for ten years,” recalls Vikram, “Everyone likes to believe that it was a struggle, and hold me up as a text-book case of how you can strive and win.” But Vikram used those ten years fruitfully, doing Malayalam and Telugu films. “The only time I was desperate,” he confesses, “Was during the making of Sethu. It took two years and I stopped doing other films. I put in so much of hard work, I had waited ten years and if I wasn’t going to be accepted, I was going to leave(the industry).”
Sethu, tragedy though it was, hit big time. And Vikram has moved on, doing not more than one film at a time, at his own pace, working with scripts he can empathise with. Since Sethu there have been many films to mark his progress – Kaasi, Gemini and more recently, King. The actor who says, “The script is most important, it has to move me. I have to become the character I play,” has nevertheless managed to tread the fine line between performance and popularity without damage to his credibility. In that sense, Gemini, that re-wrote the take at the till in recent times, was a commercial film that Vikram says he enjoyed doing. “I tried to be realistic in my portrayal of the hero,” he tells you. But playing the young man on the wrong side of the tracks did not bother him as much as his role in Sethu. “I watched Sethu in the theatre thirty times!” he laughs. In contrast, he has watched Gemini just once.
Has commercial success has changed life for this youngster who began his life under the arclights as a `pucca junior artiste’ in an ad film co-ordinated by his wife? “I would like to believe it hasn’t changed me,” he says, “I do every film like it’s my first. I want to be there for a long time. Ten years is a long time to relax. I am working really hard, that’s where I guess I have changed – I am working really hard. I really love what I am doing.”
Personally, it is the lack of privacy that could be an issue, but the actor continues his daily schedules undeterred. He walks and cycles around Besant Nagar, where he lives, but the only difference now is, “There are a lot of people cycling behind me,” he says with a laugh, “I meet people, I talk to everyone. But it’s cool.” And yes, he misses going to the beach, for Gemini has re-written his stars and made him a celebrity. For his children, it is a change, “stepping back to watch their father as an actor” signing autographs and handling fans. Vikram worries that he may be `robbing them of their normal childhood’.
The young man who began his career as a copywriter in the ad industry has no illusions about his stardom, however. “Films are transient,” says he, “I waiting for good films and good scripts – like Mouna Ragam, Nayagan, Sippikul Muthu, Padinaaru Vayadhinilae…I like my space and I do one role at a time, getting into the skin of the character.”
He is also biding his time to play the real bad guy. “Not the anti-hero,” Vikram assures us, “But a real evil man, a man with no shades of grey about him.”
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