Lokesh Kanagaraj was a meme fodder for an entire year. And then DC happened

Twelve months ago, director Lokesh Kanagaraj became Tamil cinema's favourite person to be trolled and meme-fied. Rajinikanth's Coolie, his big project, opened last August to expectations that a Rajinikanth-Lokesh combination was built to carry.The buzz, the craze for a Rajinikanth starrer, the box office explosion, and Ra 500 crore – nothing could entirely save Lokesh from the backlash he and his work received. Cut to 2026 and tables turned in a way no one saw coming. How, you ask? Read on.Despite raking in over Rs 500 crore, Coolie was subjected to criticism. This did not just limit itself to the film, and extended to Lokesh's comments on it.His comments in the aftermath read to many as an attempt to explain away the script's problems rather than own them, and that became a harder thing for the audience to forgive than a flawed film.Suddenly, Lokesh Kanagaraj became fodder for memes. So much so that several fan pages morphed his photos, twisted his statements to make them troll material and even dragged him into conversations that were never his to begin with.For a year, Lokesh spent his time working on his projects, but he was there and everywhere on social media through memes.And then Arun Matheswaran's DC, his acting debut, happened.A gamble he set himself forA year later, Lokesh's big experiment with DC was a risk — not just a film, but a gamble, and one he set up himself, by stepping in front of the camera for the first time as Devadas in Arun Matheswaran's action drama.If it had failed, it wouldn't have been read as an actor's misfire. It would have been read as confirmation that the last man standing from Coolie's wreckage was finally out of ideas, grasping for a new gimmick.That's the brutality of the meme economy — it doesn't let you fail sideways. Every follow-up becomes a sharp prick referring to the last failure, whether you wanted that framing or not. What the numbers bought himDC opened on August 7, and the numbers did what memes can't argue with. A strong opening weekend, a steady weekday hold — the film crossed Rs 50 crore globally in five days.But the box office was only ever going to let him breathe. The real test was whether Lokesh, the actor, could survive scrutiny that Lokesh, the director never fully did — and, more pointedly, whether an audience that felt talked down to a year ago would give him the benefit of the doubt again.The performance itselfHe has survived it. And it's worth being precise about why, because saying "he did well" undersells what's actually working here.Lokesh's Devadas in DC is a brooding, smoking, rage-coiled man wading through a plot soaked in blood and impulsive decisions — exactly the kind of role that punishes a first-timer for any hesitation. Lokesh didn't hesitate.What's striking was how little he oversells it. There was no first-timer's anxiety pushing him to prove he belonged in every frame; he let the stillness do the work in the quieter stretches and saved the intensity for when the film actually needed it. The action portions — and Matheswaran gave him plenty — were where his physicality read as lived-in rather than choreographed-and-hoped-for.He was not doing a director's idea of a hero. He was inhabiting a specific, damaged man, and that specificity is what a lot of actor-debuts from filmmakers lack, because most of them are performing "actor" rather than performing a character. Lokesh Kanagaraj in DC. (Photo credit: IMDb) A film that didn’t protect himIt helped that Matheswaran didn't build the film around justifying his behaviour. He just let him be. Lokesh's Das is broken, but there's a sense of goodness in him. DC wasn't structured as a vanity showcase with the camera flattering its lead at every turn — it' was a screenplay that bombards the audience with violence and blood seeping through every frame.Lokesh was also scrutinised in a film that had minor flaws to answer for, not one engineered to hide his. That he still comes through as the film's most talked-about element says something about how deliberately he calibrated the performance rather than how generously the film protected him.The redemptionThere's an irony worth sitting with. A year of memes did more to sharpen the coverage of this film than any promotional push could have. Every cinephile walked in with minimal expectations, and found a director-turned-actor who stood tall above the trolling and let his work do the talking.This is redemption, and not just in the sentimental, feel-good sense. It's Lokesh answering the one charge that actually stuck — that he handled Coolie's failure by dodging it — and DC is the proof he no longer has to.Whether this becomes a second act — Lokesh as actor, alongside Lokesh as director — or a one-time detour, DC has done the one thing a year of memes couldn't: it's made the conversation about Lokesh Kanagaraj's work again.- EndsPublished On: Aug 14, 2026 08:30 IST