When Pushkar-Gayathri’s Oram Po released back in 2007, the expletive-garnished lines of ‘Son of Gun’, the villainous character played by John Vijay, seeped into popular culture through college students who appropriated the lines and started using it in their daily conversations. Six years later, John Vijay, after having grown into a quirky baddie in Tamil Cinema, is testing waters in Mumbai with Dedh Ishqiya , sequel of Abhishek Chaubey’s Ishqiya , which released this Friday. “I play the role of a Chennai cop transferred to the Hindi-speaking hinterlands of Uttar Pradesh. It’s a small role but a significant one,” he says.
After making his Bollywood debut with Bejoy Nambiar’s David , how was it working with Nasseerudin Shah? “It wasn’t easy. I had to do deliver my dialogues and the sound was recorded live,” he adds.
Last seen in Balaji Kumar’s Vidiyumm Munn as an intelligent bounty hunter, John Vijay feels he has reached a stage where filmmakers automatically call him when they write a crucial plot-changing character. Does it bother him that he is playing a cop again? “I don’t get to play too many roles. But, I have always played roles that are dissimilar.
I don’t repeat my roles, do I?” he candidly asks. Now that he is in Bollywood’s radar, how is he going to divide his time between North and South? “Down South, I am comfortable with language and I know how it works. Up North, it’s different and I would like to do movies in which I have a significant role to play,” he says.
