In the recently released comedy-drama Hisaab Barabar, R Madhavan plays Radhe Shyam, a sincere ticket checker in the Indian railways, who is obsessed with mathematics and numbers. He wants his accounts to be clear and his finances to be settled. So much so that when he sees a discrepancy of just Rs 27 in his bank account, Radhe rushes to the bank with a written complaint. In real life, however, Madhavan is not so good at maintaining his finances. Instead, his wife takes the lead in managing it. “I only get pocket money to spend every month,” he smiles.To play such a character, the actor had to change his body language. “I had to get rid of all the heroism in my body language for the film,” he says, adding, “I started thinking like my father to deliver the lines.” His presence in the film is filled with a certain simplicity and charm. “For the role, I had to learn how it felt before I came into the industry where I was nervous about everything,” he adds. The actor’s selection of scripts in the last few years has been strikingly varied. From a railway manager reacting to a gas tragedy in The Railway Men (2023) to playing a red-eyed devil in Ajay Devgn’s Shaitaan last year, Madhavan has been incorporating a distinct style with each project. He says that he chooses scripts based on what he is going through in his life at that point in time. “Sometimes, there is one scene in the script which I imagine myself doing. That becomes like a pivotal scene around which I tend to build the whole film. But there are also those occasions when none of this happens after reading the entire script,” he says. It is important for him to relate with the character and the world of the film before agreeing to take it up. “If the film has a potential for me to make a homogenous character out of it, then I tend to do it,” he adds. When asked if it is also important for him to know the people he is working with for a project, Madhavan says, “No. For me, the bible is the script and the intent.”Hisaab Barabar also stars Kirti Kulhari in the role of a cop and Neil Nitin Mukesh as a cunning business tycoon. Neil has earlier played negative roles right from his debut with Sriram Raghavan’s neo-noir thriller Johnny Gaddaar (2007) and later in films like Players (2012) and Wazir (2016). While doing such a role, he says that it becomes helpful to not see it as a villain but understand their multiple shades. “Knowing the emotional core of the character is very important. Why is he like that? Is he a dark, dirty villain or has he got a human element to him?” he says. A scene in the climax of the film has him falling on a pile of cow dung and the actor was not comfortable doing it at first.
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