Vadivelu turns 66 today, and the timing works out nicely for anyone tracking his second act in Tamil cinema. Reports doing the rounds peg his net worth at somewhere between Rs 90 crore and Rs 100 crore, built on luxury bungalows in Chennai and Madurai and, if the reports are to be believed, a small fleet of cars parked across both properties.

The number is worth pausing on because it wasn't always this way. There was a stretch when work simply stopped coming.

Back when he was at his peak, Vadivelu fell out badly with Vijayakanth. During the 2011 assembly election campaign, he got up on DMK stages and went after the actor-politician known as Captain, in language that even he now admits went too far. Vijayakanth, for his part, never fired back. That year the AIADMK-DMDK alliance won anyway, and Vadivelu's film offers began drying up soon after. Roles disappeared almost entirely for a while. He has since said he regrets what he said on those stages, and the fallout ran deep enough that he couldn't even go pay his respects when Vijayakanth passed away.

The comeback, when it came, wasn't instant. His first attempts back in front of the camera, Naai Sekar Returns and Chandramukhi 2, leaned on the old comic register and didn't quite land. So he changed course. Maamannan gave him a character role instead of a punchline, and the film turned into a mega blockbuster. Then came Maharaja opposite Fahadh Faasil, where he played a man losing his memory with a stillness that felt less like acting and more like inhabiting the part.

Between them, Maamannan and Maharaja have done something the comedy years never quite managed: they've made a generation that grew up on memes of his old gags see him purely as an actor, full stop. Even viewers with no memory of his Vadivelu-brand slapstick from the 2000s now file him under serious character work.

He hasn't walked away from comedy altogether, though. He took a comic part in Sundar C's Gangers, a film that, by most accounts, didn't fully come together. His next outing pairs him with Prabhu Deva in Bang Bang, currently in production, and it's the one that will tell us which lane he's settling into for the next few years, the wisecracks or the weight.

Either way, at 66, with a reported nine-figure net worth and two genuine career-redefining performances behind him inside three years, Vadivelu isn't short of options. Bang Bang's shoot schedule and release date are the next things to watch for.