Vijay: The Indian film star turning politician in Tamil Nadu
Chennai-based film critic Aditya Shrikrishna noted that Vijay's appeal has not rested on acting prowess alone. "He's not a Kamal Haasan or Rajinikanth in terms of filmography," he said. "But his box office pull and fandom are huge and undeniably influential. Dancing, comedy and a keen understanding of populist cinema are his strengths."Vijay's stardom, however, has never been accidental, said Pritham K Chakravarthy, film academic and critic. "The seed was planted by his father who had Communist leanings and was keen on joining politics."Vijay began as a child actor in the 1980s and was launched as a lead actor in 1992 by his parents - filmmaker SA Chandrasekhar and singer-writer Shoba Chandrasekhar - with Naalaiya Theerpu. The film flopped, but his career did not.Over the next three decades, he appeared in nearly 70 films, charting a carefully calibrated rise - from playing the romantic hero in his films in the late 1990s to acting as an angry young man in the 2000s to a carefully-honed image as saviour and vigilante in films after 2012.Though Vijay's early roles often leaned into hyper-masculine tropes, he later "consciously course-corrected his image", points out Shrikrishna. He later started projecting a saviour figure rooted in social justice in his movies. He spoke of farmers' distress in Kaththi, healthcare corruption in Mersal, supporting women's sports in Bigil and electoral manipulation in Sarkar."Now it's a different Vijay. His on-screen persona as incorruptible, restrained, morally upright, mirrored the ethical imagination of Dravidian politics, a cinematic grammar Tamil audiences recognise instinctively," says Chakravarthy.Long before Vijay launched his party, his cinema had thus already done the ideological groundwork. Audio launches doubled as soft political addresses. Fan clubs quietly transformed into grassroots networks.The fandom is intense and ritualistic, with celebratory first-day screenings, midnight and 04:00 shows, milk offerings on towering cut-outs, garlands, drums, and whistles. "Vijay remains capable of turning a movie release into a mass civic event. He is perhaps the last of the mega stars of this scale," Shrikrishna said.
