'When my friend calls, I have to come': Sanju Samson at Athiradi's Chennai launch

Sanju Samson walked up to the podium at the Pullman in Teynampet on Sunday morning and opened with a line you could embroider on a friendship card. “When my friend calls, I have to come. That’s why I’m here.” The friend was Basil Joseph. The reason both of them were in Chennai was less sentimental: Basil’s Malayalam crossover Athiradi opens in Tamil Nadu this Friday, May 22, and the trailer needed an unveiling. The cricketer had been brought in to do the unveiling honours. He proceeded, over the next half hour, to do them by gently roasting the film’s actor-producer-director in front of the press, which is, on balance, exactly what the room had hoped he would do.

Athiradi, directed by Arun Anirudhan (the writer of Minnal Murali) and produced by Dr Ananthu S and Basil Joseph, is already a hit in Malayalam. The Tamil release drops on May 22, distributed by Five Star Creations.

Basil’s pitch on the Tamil version was unusually granular for a dubbed-release event. He kept stressing that this is not a translation. The dialogues have been rewritten in Tamil by Nelliyan, a Behindwoods short film competition winner and an upcoming director in his own right. The Tamil title was chosen on purpose, the lyrics for Pattisho were written by Arivu, and the references inside the dialogues, including a Loyola College tech-fest beat, were reworked to land in Chennai rather than be translated from Kochi. “Rather than a normal dubbed movie,” Basil said, “we have a desire to give you a version that feels like a direct Tamil movie.” He delivered most of this in functional Tamil and then, in the very last sentence of his speech, slipped in a Malayalam phrase he could not quite avoid (sathyam aayitum). The host pounced on it cheerfully. The room laughed. Athiradi, he also mentioned with the casualness people use to mention small things, is his 50th film as an actor.

Sanju on his friend was the part everyone had quietly turned up to hear. He led, briefly, with the kind thing. He knows the work Basil puts in, he said. He knows the team Basil has built around himself. He is on stage in Chennai because of those two things, and he is sure the film will land. Then he opened the file on his friend. The two of them, it turns out, live in the same Kochi apartment building — Basil upstairs, Sanju downstairs, terrace shared. The proximity, he reported, has not made Basil any easier to grab a dinner with. “I finish a tour, I call him, I say let’s have dinner tomorrow. He says, you’re telling me this today? You should have told me a week ago. Even till 2030, he has no dates.” Basil tried, gamely, to defend himself: that was for films, friendship dates were a separate calendar. Sanju, deadpan: “Now I have to send him an email if I want to go for dinner.” Then came the cameo bit. Basil had once offered Sanju a small part in Athiradi. Sanju had passed because the role, as far as he was concerned, was too small. Basil clarified, deadpan back: the role was an auto driver. The room held its breath. “Auto drivers are mass,” Sanju said. “The auto’s name could be Sixer.” Then, somewhere in the middle of all this, the host casually mentioned that this was Basil’s 50th film. Sanju turned to Basil, completely affronted. “He didn’t even tell me. You need to give me a treat today.” Basil promised the treat.

Watch Athiradi Trailer.

The cricket-and-cinema crossover went exactly the way every Chennai room was always going to make it go. The host asked Sanju the obligatory question about CSK. Sanju, who has spent the last two months of this IPL season in the city, gave the obligatory crowd-pleasing answer. “Like that Vodafone dog ad, wherever he goes, I follow,” he said, before saying nice things about the paasam of the local audiences. (Aishwarya Lekshmi did a tonally similar pivot toward the new CM Vijay government earlier this month, from a different angle.) The host then handed Basil a CSK jersey, asked him to sign it for the team, a photograph was taken, and the bit moved on. The encore landed a minute later, when the host asked Sanju to deliver a Superstar dialogue for his friend. The cricketer protested. His friends in the audience told him not to. He did it anyway, gamely, mortified, eyes elsewhere. “Naan oru vaati sonna, nooru vaati sonna mathiri.” The room cheered. Sanju looked exactly as embarrassed as a top-order batsman doing dialogue impressions should look.

Athiradi the film, the actual reason all of this was happening, is being positioned, in the words of co-actor Ajmal Shersha, as “pure mass” for the Tamil college audience. The story is built around a B.Tech tech-fest, the same texture that powered the Malayalam reception in Kerala. Tovino Thomas leads alongside Basil; the rest of the on-screen friend group, by Ajmal Zain’s account, is also an off-screen friend group, with several of the actors being real-life college mates of the director. Tovino, who walked a Malayalam release into Tamil Nadu earlier this year with Pallichattambhi, is not at the Chennai launch in person, but he is the other half of the marquee.

Sanju closed his bit on stage the way the best ambassadors do, looping back to the work. He has not yet seen the Malayalam version, because the IPL has been full; he plans to watch both versions and report back to Basil with feedback as detailed as the cricket-shot feedback Basil sends him after every match. “I’ll tell him, that scene wasn’t right, you should have played a straight drive there.” The favour, returned. Athiradi opens in Tamil Nadu on Friday, May 22.