The International Achievement Recognition Awards (IARA) announced that Vijay has bagged the Best Actor award for his performance in Mersal. The award ceremony happened in the month of September this year at Canary Warf, London. However, actor Vijay gave the event a miss.

During his recent trip to the UK, Vijay met the IARA team and personally collected his award.

The film, which was released on October 18 last year on the occasion of Deepavali, had won numerous honors at the Ananda Vikatan Cinema Awards, Edison Awards, National Film Awards UK and Techofes Awards. It also won the Best Foreign Language Film award at the 4th edition of the National Film Awards UK 2018.

The award was given based on fan votes. The film had stiff competition in this sector with several films from various countries.

The film was also selected and screened at The Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival (BIFAN), which was held in Bucheon city earlier this year, where films from the entire world were screened. It was one of the three south Indian films to be chosen for the fest, with the other two being the Malayalam movie Ezra and the Telugu flick Jai Lava Kusa.

Directed by Atlee, Mersal is an action thriller that has Vijay playing the lead role with Kajal Agarwal and Samantha as the women lead. The others in the star cast playing supporting roles include SJ Surya, Vadivelu and Sathyaraj.

Touted to be the biggest hit in Vijay’s career, it went on to collect Rs 250 crore at the end of five weeks at the box office. The film had a massive pre-release buzz. Mersal went on to score a century at the box office.

Made on a huge budget of Rs 120 crores, the film was bankrolled by N Ramasamy, Hema Rukmani and H Murali under the banner Thenandal Studio Limited. AR Rahman had composed the music for this venture with GK Vishnu cranking the camera and Ruben editing it.

(Content provided by Digital Native)