AR Murugadoss on Kaththi, Sarkar: ‘Was not done for Vijay’s political aspirations’

3 min readHyderabadJul 12, 2026 02:07 PM IST

AR Murugadoss with Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Vijay.

Filmmaker AR Murugadoss has addressed long-running speculation about whether his political dramas with Vijay, particularly Kaththi and Sarkar, were crafted with an eye on the actor’s real-world political ambitions. In a recent interview, the director traced Kaththi’s origins back to his early career and firmly rejected any suggestion of a hidden agenda.

“I was an assistant to a dialogue writer. I wanted to do a dialogue-based movie after Ramana, a film that connects with society. That’s how the Kaththi script started,” Murugadoss said in an interview with Sudhir Srinivasan. “I wrote it based on the situation at that time and Thalapathy Vijay’s mood. We wanted to make a movie that was the complete opposite of Thuppakki.”

He was direct about motive. “It was not done for Vijay sir’s political aspirations,” he said, adding, “We didn’t even do Sarkar with that intention.”

The remarks carry added weight now that Vijay has moved from cinema into active politics, having gone on to become Tamil Nadu’s Chief Minister following his party TVK’s election win earlier this year. That real-life turn has reignited interest in his older films, several of which cast him as a reformer taking on corruption and injustice, and has led many to view them in hindsight as almost prophetic.

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AR Murugadoss and Vijay have worked together three times: Thuppakki in 2012, a straightforward action thriller about a soldier taking down a terror cell; Kaththi in 2014, which folded in a farmer-land-rights storyline and social commentary; and Sarkar in 2018, a political thriller in which Vijay’s character exposes electoral fraud and eventually enters politics himself.

The reference to Ramana points to AR Murugadoss’s own breakthrough. His 2002 film, starring Vijayakanth as a vigilante taking on institutional corruption, earned him the Tamil Nadu State Film Award for Best Dialogue Writer and established the socially driven, dialogue-heavy style he says he wanted to build on when he sat down to write Kaththi.

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Murugadoss has spoken before about the turbulence that followed Sarkar’s release in 2018, when the film’s storyline, involving voter fraud and political awakening, ran into protests and backlash from groups who saw it as inflammatory. He has previously recalled banners being torn down and police confrontations outside theatres during that period, calling it one of the most emotionally difficult stretches of his career.

With Vijay’s transition from screen to office now complete, AR Murugadoss’s latest comments read as an attempt to separate the films from the politician they are increasingly read against, insisting that the scripts were shaped by story and timing rather than any calculated plan for Vijay’s future.