An old interview with the veteran Tamil villain actor has resurfaced online, revealing why he chose factory workers and old classmates over famous drinking buddies even as his health and career both took hits.
Ponnambalam built a career out of being the man every Tamil superstar needed as a foil. Rajinikanth, Kamal Haasan, Vijay, Ajith, he's squared off against all of them on screen. Now, an old interview of his has resurfaced on social media, and it's got people talking about a side of him that never made it into the tabloids at the time.
In the clip, doing rounds again per Filmibeat Tamil, Ponnambalam talks about the drinking culture that surrounds the industry's biggest names. "Big actors would call me to drink with them," he says. "But I wouldn't go. Once my work for the day was done, I'd go with people I studied with, people who feel like brothers to me."
His reasoning is blunt. "The people around me are poor. Can I keep going looking for rich people? You can't just ask for love, love comes on its own when you do your work honestly. Whoever has it, helps me," he says.
A career that flattened out
Ponnambalam didn't just trade on his size. His mannerisms, the way he'd stretch out a line or land a look, have outlived most of the films they appeared in. Half of Tamil Nadu still quotes him. The phrase "thai kizhavi", now everywhere thanks to a song in Dhanush's Thiruchitrambalam, actually goes back to Ponnambalam first, used on Manorama in K S Ravikumar's Naattamai, with a delivery nobody's forgotten since.
But the roles dried up as his career hit a rough patch, and that's around when he signed on for Bigg Boss, hoping the show would open doors again. It didn't, by his own account. Offers stayed scarce after he came out of the house.
Things got worse before they got better. Ponnambalam developed kidney trouble and was hospitalised, and according to Filmibeat Tamil's report, most of his industry colleagues didn't bother checking in on him during that stretch. Dhanush was an exception, stepping up with real help, something Ponnambalam has acknowledged himself in later conversations.
He's out of the hospital and recovering now, slowly, but fans watching the old clips online have been quick to point out that he doesn't carry the same swagger he once did on screen. That's left a lot of people online feeling for a performer who spent decades being everyone's favourite villain and precious little time being anyone's priority when it mattered.
Whether this resurfaced interview nudges any producer to write him back into a script is the open question. For now, Ponnambalam is focused on getting his health back, and Tamil cinema is left to reckon with how easily it let one of its most recognisable faces slip out of frame.
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