R Madhavan cracks up Tanmay Bhat and gang as he says ‘Rang De Basanti was exciting for me for 9 minutes’

R Madhavan had a career defining role in 2006 film, Rang De Basanti, although it was just nine minutes of his screen presence. The actor played the role of Flight Lt. Ajay Singh Rathod, who is killed when his MiG-21 jet malfunctions and crashes, and made moviegoers literally grieve for him. Madhavan recently talked about the film in a fun chat with Tanmay Bhat and others, and they all cracked up as he mentioned the short length of the role.

During a chat with Tanmay Bhat in June, R Madhavan was asked if he had seen the second half of Rang De Basanti and does he know what happened. Even before he could answer, all the co-hosts, including Rohan Joshi, cracked up. Laughing along with them, R Madhavan said, “great question. Rang De Basanti was only valid, very exciting for me for nine minutes.”

In an old interview, R Madhavan had told Film Companion about how he only worked for eight days for the nine-minute-long role. He had said, ”I was supposed to do Siddharth’s role but I couldn’t because I had long hair, and I ended up doing the pilot’s role. Big revelation in my life, because even now when they speak about Rang De Basanti, my name is synonymous with that film, for a nine-minute appearance. And these gentlemen, who worked so hard for one-and-a-half years, and I only worked for eight days, I think. And I realised that immortality in terms of being recognised as a character depends on how you play that character, and how that character is written and presented.”

He had also said that he worked very hard to get everything right in just nine minutes and to make sure that the audience felt that they’d ‘lost somebody that they knew’.

Directed by Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra, Rang De Basanti was the highest grossing Hindi film of the year and was India’s official entry for the Golden Globe Awards and the Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category. It starred Aamir Khan, Siddharth, Sharman Joshi, Atul Kulkarni, Kunal Kapoor, Alice Patten and Soha Ali Khan in main roles.

R Madhavan was chatting with Tanmay for his YouTube channel around the release of his directorial, Rocketry: The Nambi Effect. The film features R Madhavan in the lead as aerospace engineer Nambi Narayanan. It revolves around the life of the scientist and how he was wrongly accused of espionage.