Actor Vijay Sethupathi never thought he’d be a part of it Most popular actor in Tamil movies. For him, as he once said, he was thinking about a life “adrift” when other of his childhood classmates were planning their own careers. After moving to Dubai to pay off his loan, he returned to India to work as an accountant in a theater before stumbling into acting. He doesn’t like to call this phase a “struggle”—for him, it’s learning.
Sethupathi starred in Seenu Ramasamy’s Thenmerku Paruvakatru in 2010 after some uncredited roles and later supporting roles in the film. Since then, he’s played a number of different roles, from the delivery guy at Pizza (2012), smalloodhu Kauvvam (2013), an old man in Orange Mittai (2015), a rural accountant in Aandavan Kattalai (2016), or the man who longed for his school sweetheart in 96, Sethupathi is known for assuming any role with ease.
In 2017, before he further rose to fame with Vikram Vedha, a Bollywood remake due in 2022, Sethupathi told Scroll that he knew Vedha was his role. “Vedhalam’s wisdom comes from life itself. He sees life so beautifully. I feel like I am closer to him.” Later filmmakers Pushkar and Gayatri added to this belief, stating in an interview that Vijay Sethupathi He was their first choice for this movie because he was exactly what they thought of Vedha. They said they were “firmly convinced” that he would be the perfect Veda. “We really like everything he’s done before,” Pushkar said. “His basic character is very Vedic,” he said. The film was a huge success, and Hrithik Roshan, who played Vedha in the Bollywood remake, had to draw plenty of comparisons to Sethupathi.
Still, Sethupathi doesn’t seem swayed by his stardom, nor does he try to alter himself for a glamorous public persona. Despite life’s ups and downs, Sethupathi is determined not to call it a struggle. He said he wasn’t “destined” to act and that he just wanted the simple life of paying off his loans and getting married. “My friend once said that I was born to be an actor. I disagreed with him and said I have nothing to do with acting, I don’t even watch movies. So it can’t be predestined. I just want to pay off my took out a loan, got married and built a house of my own. As I was trying to find myself, the film career happened in the weirdest way. My friend turned around and said, in the years before I got into film, I Preparing me to be an actor has given me a great experience. A learning phase should not be called a struggle.”
He is terrified by the flattery of fans, who he thinks “don’t know all those trivial, weird, normal thoughts about him as a person.” “I want to tell them that fans should be within their scope. Fans who don’t hurt themselves to please me are my favorite. I want to tell them that it is useless to flatter our actors.”