Thalaivasal Vijay will be acting in a Hindi-English film that will be directed by Chuck Russell, who has made Hollywood blockbuster like The Mask with Jim Carrey, Eraser with Arnold Schwarzenegger and The Scorpion King with Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock.
Says the actor, “The film is titled Junglee in Hindi, and has Vidyut Jammwal in the lead. It’s a commercial movie and deals with elephant poaching. I play Vidyut’s father. It’s a key role as an architect who is an animal lover, who tries to stop the poaching by African smugglers.”
He says that the team had come across a short film in which he had acted and approached him for this role. “I had acted in a short film that was directed a student of PSG College, Coimbatore. Somehow, they had seen this film and reached out to me. The director and I interacted on Skype. He gave me a scene and asked me to perform that in English. We met in Mumbai on November 4 and when I asked Chuck Russell why he had chosen me, he told me that he found my voice to be excellent and my diction very good,” reveals Thalaivasal Vijay, who left for Thailand on Sunday night to shoot for the film.
Mark Irwin, who has shot films like Scream, Dumb And Dumber and There’s Something About Mary, is the cinematographer of the film. “We will be shooting in Thailand for almost a month. We will be living in the forest, in an elephant camp. Right now, we are shooting the Hindi version. Though I can speak Hindi, thanks to my father being in the railways, it isn’t perfect. Since they are shooting the film with sync sound, they gave me the script almost a month-and-a-half ago. Even though I’ve been shooting for other films during this time, I’ve been waking up by 4am every day to practice my Hindi lines,” informs the actor.