800 will talk more about my life off the field: Muthiah Muralidaran

CHENNAI: We see Muthiah Muralidaran at a Chennai hotel and the first thing that comes to our mind immediately is of him tossing the ball with his fingers before he gets ready for his run up.

The smiling assassin of world class batsmen has picked up 1,334 wickets with the same action that each one of us would have tried imitating his action at least once as a kid.

“I saw Madhurr Mittal in the trailer and I am convinced with the way he has replicated my action,” assures the former off-spinner. He adds, “He has been a part of a sports film before, titled Million Dollar Arm, that revolves around baseball, so I am sure he knows how it works.”

Murali wasn’t initially in favour of a biopic to his name. However, he reminisces on what made him agree for one and says, “We run an NGO called Foundation of Goodness in 1998, which was started by me and my manager Ashan Mallalasekera as trustees.

Sri Lanka was ravaged by religion, community and political jeopardies in 1995. Hence, without intervening much in all these affairs, we came up with Foundation of Goodness that works tirelessly for education, sports and other youth welfare programs.

We received funding from Sachin Tendulkar, Shane Warne, and Sir Ian Botham. Cricketers never publicise their charity work. It so happened that, filmmakers Venkat Prabhu, Sub bu and director of 800, Sripathy visited the foundation in Galle to help the Tamil community and came to know that I am one of the founder members.

VP and my wife are friends from the same neighbourhood in RA Puram. It was his idea that there could be a biopic made on my life. I was initially hesitant but my manager told me that the foundation would benefit from this, and I agreed.

Then Venkat and the producers, who were interested in making this, did some research. However, things did not work well between the VP and the producer, and the idea was dropped.”

Now, Murali talks about the present script that was taken over by Sripathy and gets candid about the controversies when Vijay Sethupathi was cast to play as Muralidaran on screen. “I asked Sripathy to go ahead with the plan. VJS came on board.

I never anticipated that the film would be marred by controversies. In fact, I see that as a drama staged by people with vested interests and it grew bigger. Vijay Sethupathi felt bad for walking away.

At the end of the day, it is his livelihood and can’t put his career at stake just for my biopic,” he smiles. The off-spinner also says that he has been following Tamil films and is impressed with new-gen directors and their work.

“I follow the work of directors like Nelson, Lokesh and Karthik Subbaraj. They have been doing a great job and Sripathy will be one among them when 800 releases.”

The 1996 World Cup winner is happy with the way the research was carried out and says that the film will throw light on his life off the cricket field. “800 will show you only 20 to 30 minutes of my on-field achievements.

I was surprised when Sripathy told me a few dressing room incidents and what was spoken during the controversial no-ball call and other incidents from my life-- including my ancestors migrating to the island to work in a tea plantation,” he opens up.

There were speculations that Sachin Tendulkar has played a cameo in the film. “I don’t think Sachin has played a cameo. He would probably be there in a footage or two as we both have played in the same era.”

Ross Emerson’s no-ball call is something every cricket fan would want to know from the horse’s mouth himself. But we throw a situation on Murali if he had played for India and the dreadful 1998 Australian summer had happened if Mohammad Azharuddin was his captain and not Arjuna Ranatunga.

“Ranatunga en appa sthaanam la irukavar (Arjuna Ranatunga is like my father-figure). Had I played for India, it would be a question mark on whether Azhar would have dragged the team out of the field. I really don’t know. But yes Arjuna did it for me,” he concludes.