He backstabbed me: Watching Michael reopened old wounds for Ram Gopal Varma

Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma has shared a personal note on Michael Jackson, recalling how the pop icon shaped his artistic imagination from the moment he first watched Thriller during his engineering college days in Vijayawada. Varma said the memory returned after he watched Michael, the musical biographical drama on Jackson.

In the note, Varma wrote about the shock of June 25, 2009, when he woke up to television screens carrying the words, ‘Michael Jackson is Dead’, and said the singer’s death left a void for him. He also looked back at the first time he saw Jackson on screen in 1984 and explained why the singer’s presence stayed with him despite the controversies around him.

Varma on hearing of Jackson’s death

Recalling the day Jackson died, Varma wrote, “After watching MICHAEL film, my memory went back to that horrible day June 25th, 2009 when I slept late with the television still murmuring like a ghost in the darkness of my room, and as I groggily woke up in the morning and my eyes went to the screen to see those terrible white letters against black: ‘Michael Jackson is Dead’ (sic).”

He added that seeing headlines about Jackson’s body being sent to a mortuary shattered the larger-than-life image he had carried of the global icon for decades.

Varma said his connection with Jackson began on January 2, 1984, when a friend took him to a small video parlour in Vijayawada and made him watch Thriller. He said the experience changed the way he understood performance, music and visual storytelling.

Varma wrote, “Back in my engineering college days in Vijayawada, on January 2nd 1984, a friend dragged me into a dingy video parlour, insisting I had to see something. The lights got switched off, and then THRILLER hit me like a punch in the gut. It was not just a song or a dance. It was an invasion. My eyes, conditioned by a lifetime of mediocrity, were violently pried open. The production, the choreography, the seamless ecstasy blended into one single divine entity .. it was spectacle on a level I had never imagined possible and at the centre of that storm was him (sic).”

‘The scandals? The controversies?’

Explaining why Jackson meant more to him than a performer, Varma said it was not only the dance or the voice, but the ‘aura’ the singer carried. He added that the controversies around Jackson did not affect his admiration because, in his words, what the artiste gave his ‘senses and soul’ outweighed everything else.

He wrote, “The scandals? The controversies? They never bothered me. They were background noise. What he gave my senses and my soul far outweighed anything a human court or a tabloid magazine could ever throw at him. To me, he was either God or God’s special creation and that is exactly why I hate him (sic).”

In another part of the note, the Satya director said, “I hate Michael Jackson for dying. I hate him for proving that even he was human.”

The 64-year-old filmmaker wrote, “I hate that he, too, needed oxygen and blood like the rest of us. I hate that his heart could stop beating, too. I hate that I lived long enough to see those words on CNN: ‘Michael Jackson’s body sent to Mortuary.’ He backstabbed me. He betrayed my fantasy (sic).”

Varma ended his note by saying he continues to love Jackson beyond words and imagines him “moonwalking across galaxies” with a brilliance “even the stars cannot contain”.

About Michael

Michael is a 2026 musical biographical drama film directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by John Logan. The film follows the early life of American singer Michael Jackson, from his involvement with the Jackson 5 in the 1960s to the Bad tour in the late 1980s. Jackson’s nephew Jaafar Jackson plays the lead role, while the supporting cast includes Nia Long, KeiLyn Durrel Jones, Laura Harrier, Jessica Sula, Mike Myers, Miles Teller and Colman Domingo.