R Madhavan might be a rage down South, but in the Hindi film industry we’ve seen him mostly in multi-star projects. That has changed with 13 B, a supernatural thriller by Vikram Kumar. “This is my film,” grinned Madhavan, a tad wryly, on a visit to Delhi along with co-star Neetu Chandra at the PVR Plaza, Connaught Place.

Casually dressed in a blue sweatshirt and jeans, Madhavan appeared confident of the film doing well, due to its “never-seen-or-heard-before” kind of script. “The moment I heard the script I knew I had to work in it since it wasn’t the typical, morbid horror film with spooky incidents. Instead the film was thriller that ensured you would not leave your seat,” he said. The film which was completed after several tweaks in the script, over a period of seven years, sees Madhavan playing a middle-class family man (Manohar) who moves into his new apartment on the 13th floor.

The family gets hooked to a TV show that has a similar story of a family moving into their new house. Fiction becomes reality once the scenes played out on the show (good and bad) start happening to them. “I am not too fond of horror films or movies with a suspense plot in them. But since I knew Vikram for several years I had a gut instinct about this film,” said Madhavan, who regards Sixth Sense and A Beautiful Mind as his favourite movies.

Not one to be swayed by superstition or myth, Madhavan admitted having some “eerie coincidences” during the 47-day shoot in Chennai and Mumbai. “We could not shoot on the 13th of every month or at 1 pm every day for some strange reason,” he smiled. With his first Bollywood project of 2009, Madhavan promises to be seen more often in Hindi cinema. “I have always preferred to stay on the periphery in Bollywood since Tamil cinema has been my mainstay. Most of the films I have done here have had an archival value,” he explained. “But I just wish some of these projects were more than archival records and became Box Office hits,” he added as an afterthought.