The boy who stayed in the room when the creditors came

Most families have a drill for when the debt collectors turn up. People find somewhere else to be. The Sethupathi household had one too, except that the youngest person in it kept breaking it, and that is the part Vijay Sethupathi still returns to.

“They say that youth is all about struggle and hardship. I’ve heard that question posed to me since I was a little boy. That was all there was,” he said on the Truly Ram podcast. “No matter when creditors would come or whoever sat down, I would sit right there with my dad. It was all me.”

There is no heroics in the telling, which is what makes it land. He was not negotiating or arguing anyone down. He was a kid pulling up a chair so his father would not have to face the room alone, at an age when most children are being ushered out of it.

He remembers the good part of those years with the same specificity he brings to the bad. His father kept one small ritual going through all of it. “He has this regular practice. Around 9:30, he used to come here, park his Bullet bike and have some fried rice with us.” A man in debt, still parking the bike at half past nine for fried rice with his kids.

Money set the terms for everything else. “If you want something, you have to calculate how much you need it,” he said. “Your financial situation decides that.” He took daily wage work while he was still in school, and later a job at a telephone booth, and several others after that. Acting was not a childhood dream he nursed through the hard years, because there was no room for one. “I don’t have any desire to do movies, sir. I’ve always loved working.” The plan was work. Cinema happened to be what the work turned into, after he came back from Dubai and drifted into theatre.

The rest is the filmography: small parts, then Thenmerku Paruvakaatru and Pizza, then Soodhu Kavvum and Vikram Vedha and Maharaja. He is now among the highest paid actors in the country, reportedly commanding somewhere between Rs 15 crore and Rs 25 crore a film depending on the language and the scale. The distance between the chair beside his father and that number is the whole story, and he is the one who keeps measuring it.

Next is Train with Mysskin, due in August, with Arasan, Pocket Novel, Slum Dog and a Jailer 2 cameo behind it. The man who never wanted to act cannot seem to stop working.