The 'psycho' first impression that cost Sethupathi years with Mysskin

The joke wrote itself, so Vijay Sethupathi told it on himself. Years before Mysskin directed him, the actor took one look at the filmmaker and decided he wanted no part of him. The man looked like a psycho, Sethupathi thought, so why go looking for trouble.

He set the scene at the launch of Train, the pair’s first film together, a dark thriller built around a single night’s events aboard a moving train. Long before any of that, Sethupathi was a junior artist turning up to auditions Mysskin was running. Once he had become a leading man, Mysskin called him for a role. Sethupathi walked in, took in the director’s face, got spooked, and lied his way out with the oldest excuse in the industry: no dates.

Then Psycho came out. Sethupathi watched it, fell for it, and the whole thing flipped. He has a habit, he explained, of phoning a director whose film he loves just to check whether he read it the way it was meant. He did that with Mysskin, then went further: they met in person and talked for more than eight hours about the film alone. Mysskin sent him home with a wristwatch. “Mysskin has earned more love than I have in cinema,” Sethupathi said. “That is why everyone celebrates him.”

The friendship that started over that conversation carried through Pisaasu 2 and now Train. Sethupathi described a set that ran on something other than paychecks: every day Mysskin handed a thousand rupees to a junior artist who had performed well and another thousand to a technician who had, and the crew pushed itself not for the cash but for his nod of approval. A good scene ended in applause. Each day, he said, felt like a festival.

That warmth is the part he wanted the room to sit with. To audiences, Train will play as a thriller, the register Sethupathi has worked before in Maharaja. To the people who shot it, he said, it was a romantic journey and the best kind of experience. Producer Kalaipuli S. Thanu, who backs the film under V Creations, has told him it opens in August, and Sethupathi closed by thanking him for the date. His speech landed alongside Ram’s blunter tribute at the same event, the two friends drawing very different portraits of the same stubborn director.