In recent years, Madhavan seems to be undergoing a career renaissance. First with the brilliant Irudhi Suttru and then with Vikram Vedha, alongside Vijay Sethupathi last year. Now, Madhavan is set to collaborate with North Indian director, Ananth Mahadevan, in a film about an ISRO (India’s version of NASA) scientist.

In an exclusive with Firstpost, the director had this to say regarding why he cast Madhavan:

For a film like this, we cannot think of an actor who is not educated or aware. The actor should not only be in tune with just politics and general awareness but science itself. And Madhavan is an electronics engineer, and he knows science and what rockets are. He also had a stint in Indian air-force training. Unless the actor is aware of what the subject is all about, he will not know how to handle the nuts and bolts when I put him in the ISRO laboratory. I don’t want bloomers happening in my film. I think Madhavan is the only Indian actor qualified to do this part because he is a thinking-actor who is also well-read.

While I don’t necessarily agree that an actor needs to be aware of certain issues to be cast in a role — most actors do a crap ton of research once they’ve been cast to act in a particular role — there’s no denying Madhavan’s immense talent, especially in recent years. It’ll be great to see what he brings to the table in this movie.

This currently untitled biopic is set to be made as a trilingual film (Tamil, English and Hindi).