The clip is old but the timing isn't. As Vijay and Udhayanidhi Stalin square off across the Tamil Nadu assembly aisle, a throwback interview of Udhayanidhi recalling how he first landed a film with Vijay has started doing the rounds again, per Filmibeat Tamil.

In the interview, Udhayanidhi says he knew Vijay from before his own production career began and that he went up to him directly. "I told Vijay anna, give me a date," he recalls saying. Vijay's reported response was blunt: go do a film with Vishal first, then come back to him. Udhayanidhi says he refused to budge. He wanted his first production to be with Vijay and no one else. That insistence is how Kuruvi happened, he says.

The clip wouldn't mean much on its own. What's giving it fresh legs is where the two men stand today. Filmibeat Tamil's report describes Vijay as Tamil Nadu's chief minister and Udhayanidhi as Leader of the Opposition, a role that fell to him after his father M.K. Stalin lost his own Kolathur seat even as his campaign there was, by most accounts, a strong one. The report says DMK loyalists are still struggling to explain that defeat, with some even directing their frustration at Kolathur's voters. Vijay's party, per the same report, won 108 seats and formed a minority government with backing from parties that had been part of the DMK-led alliance before the polls.

Whatever the arithmetic, the two men are no longer on the same side of anything. Udhayanidhi has reportedly used his floor-leader role to press Vijay on law and order and governance failures, question after question, while steering clear of theatrics. Vijay's answers, the report says, haven't quite kept pace. In the assembly session referenced in the report, he's said to have skipped direct replies and instead reached for old material, the Sarkaria Commission report that TVK has used against the DMK before, a jab at Stalin over MISA, and a full reading of Enforcement Directorate allegations against the party. Udhayanidhi is said to have taken it in without much reaction and walked off.

Whether Filmibeat's account of the assembly exchange and the poll numbers holds up under scrutiny is a separate question from the interview itself, which is genuinely old footage getting a second life online. The two were close once, film and family both. Whether that history counts for anything now depends on who's asking, and how long Tamil Nadu's politics keeps running through a script this two men wrote as friends first.