He said the reality check hit him hard. Here he was, in his early 40s, the age where most actors are supposed to be entering their prime, and he had already drifted into autopilot. “How am I entering into a cruise control phase in my early 40s? That was not what I had wanted. There was a self-confidence which was not the right type of self-confidence. There was a comfort zone which was actually making me decay,” the actor said.

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The comfort zone, Madhavan explained, was financial. By that point in his career, Madhavan did not need films to pay his bills. Endorsements, public appearances, speeches and corporate events were generating enough income to keep the lifestyle running regardless of whether his films worked or not. The money had removed the fear. And without the fear, the hunger had dried up.

So he did something most actors in his position would never consider, he shut it all down. “I first put a stop to that. I said okay, I’m not doing anything right now. I’m not going to be doing any more endorsements. I’m going to then see if I can get the hunger and the insecurity back. I needed to feel a sense of nervousness. I needed to feel, oh my god, I’m going to lose it.”

Madhavan called it a controlled free fall, a crisis that shouldn’t be mistaken for a breakdown. “I was smart enough to get into it before it happened on its own. I got rid of all the surface layers and uncovered my soul. And I really mean it, not in a philosophical sense. I mean it in the sense that I needed to feel that nervousness again,” he said.

What followed was a four-year stretch, from 2011 to 2015, that Madhavan calls the reality check of his life. “That phase of four years really taught me a lot. It was the reality check of my life,” he said.