When actor Vijayakanth performed a dangerous stunt and gave credit for it to a body double!

Chennai, May 18 (IANS) Showering praises on Captain Vijayakanth, for both his courage and considerate nature, ace director A R Murugadoss has now disclosed that the late actor had refused to employ a body double to perform a dangerous stunt in one of Tamil cinema's iconic cult classics, 'Captain Prabhakaran' and had instead performed the stunt himself.

Participating in the audio launch event of director Anbu's Padaithalaivan, featuring Vijayakanth's son Shanmuga Pandiyan as the hero, Murugadoss recalled fondly the time he had spent working with Vijayakanth.

"I was working as an assitant director to R K Selvamani sir then. There was a risky helicopter shot that had to be canned. I think Master Rocky Rajesh was the stunt choreographer for that film. He said,'This shot is risky and therefore, let us use a dupe (a body double) for this sequence.' Vijayakanth sir did not agree. He turned to the stunt choreographer and asked him, 'Why do you want a dupe to do this stunt? Even he (the stuntman) has only one life. Has he got two lives?' When I heard this, my respect for the man increased.

"It was a very difficult stunt, which he performed himself. The shot was such that he had to stand on one of the landing skids of the helicopter and perform the stunt. Helicopters then were not how they are today. If a person stood on one skid, we needed to carefully balance his weight on the other skid. Otherwise, the stability of the chopper could get affected. After a point we could only see Vijayakanth's silhouette on the skid as the chopper went up. The risky stunt was performed. Soon after finishing it, Vijayakanth told us, 'Please tell my wife that this stunt was performed by a dupe (body double) and not me.' We have seen several people who get body doubles to do stunts for them, use C G instead of actually doing a stunt, all the while claiming that they did the stunts themselves. However, Vijayakanth was the only one to do all his stunts himself and tell people that they had been done by a stuntperson," he said.

--IANS

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