Leading Tamil actor Vijay Sethupathi will be kicking off 2024 with the highly-anticipated Merry Christmas scheduled to open in cinemas worldwide as a grand Pongal treat on January 12. The Hindi-Tamil bilingual has the National Award winner sharing screen space with Bollywood sensation Katrina Kaif and is directed by Sriram Raghavan of Andhadhun (2018) fame. With the response to the Tamil and Hindi versions of the Merry Christmas trailers receiving a stellar feedback from fans, Vijay Sethupathi sat down along with director Sriram Raghavan for an exclusive interview with Galatta to talk about their film, while also sharing his views about putting a stop to taking up villain and cameo roles.
Speaking about appearing in special guest roles in films, Vijay Sethupathi said, "Beyond the fear of such a move affecting my market, the people who are approaching me for such characters are more. I've said NO to almost 10-20 guest roles. I've stopped it altogether. I had a different view about it before." He added, "I used to earlier believe that there's nothing wrong in doing such roles as it would give support to a film if I acted for 2-3 days since this is our livelihood. But, after a point of time, it became frequent - be it upcoming directors or established filmmakers. As a result, I took a strict decision against it as it sometimes affected the business of the films I was acting as a hero."
Vijay Sethupathi, who previously hit the high note with his performances as the antagonist most notably in films Petta (2019), Master (2021), Vikram (2022), and Jawan (2023), also opened up about doing villain roles and said, "Similar to the guest roles, many people began asking me to play negative characters. At a certain stage, I felt that I was moving into the territory of playing a typical villain. There were some people who asked me to say NO only after a story narration, but I'm not able to allocate time for everything. And, that is why I said during the recently-held Goa Film Festival that I've stopped taking up such roles altogether."
Watch Vijay Sethupathi and director Sriram Raghavan talk about Merry Christmas and more in the interview below:
