TAKING A GAMBLE

As he gears up for the Netflix series Decoupled, actor R. Madhavan says Indian entertainment needs to take more risks in order to be successful globally

- Suhani Singh

BREAKING BOUNDARIES COMES EASILY to R. Madhavan. Having acted in nearly 1,800 episodes of television serials, he was once thought of as “overexposed”. They said he will never do a film. Proving his critics wrong, he made his Tamil feature debut in a Mani Ratnam-directed romance, Alaipayuthey (2000). Those who said he wouldn’t make the cut in Hindi cinema were forced to eat humble pie when he acted in Rehnaa Hai Terre Dil Mein the very next year. He would later star in 3 Idiots (2009), the first film to cross the Rs 200 crore mark at the box office. In 2018, Madhavan would become one of the first actors to do a web series—Amazon Prime’s Breathe. Now, three years later, he is the first star to act in Netflix’s first wholly English Indian original, Decoupled. Written by author Manu Joseph, the series sees Madhavan play Arya, a popular author whose married life is on its last legs. “When there have been boundaries set, they have been set by people who are conditioned to think that they make sense,” he says. “I don’t want to adhere to that.”

Though used to taking risks, the actor does admit that the audience response to