Bollywood actor Mansi Taxak has landed herself in hot waters after passing comments on her controversial wedding night scene from the recently released Animal. The particular scene has been denounced by many for depicting marital rape. In the film, the actor plays one of the three wives of Bobby Deol’s actor Abrar Haque. However, in an interview with Zoom Entertainment, Mansi denied any form of assault occurring in the scene.
Nodding at Abrar’s 'twisted' nature, the actor attributed his actions to his ‘animal instincts' during the specific sequence. Directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga and featuring Ranbir Kapoor, Animal has faced criticism for portraying toxic masculinity and misogyny, mirroring Vanga's past work on Kabir Singh. Also starring Rashmika Mandanna, Anil Kapoor and Triptii Dimri, the film has become a massive success, raking in approximately INR550 crores worldwide.
During the interview, Mansi was directly questioned about the wedding scene where Abrar reacts violently after receiving news of his brother's death. “It is shocking, of course,” she stated. “Nobody expects their wedding to end that way. When the wedding sequence starts, if you see the lights [and] the way the art was done, it was beautiful. You hear the music that has gone so viral on Instagram. It was heading towards a beautiful end and suddenly, you see something like this happening,” the actor appreciated the scene’s opening aesthetics.
Emphasising the unexpected turn of events as a deliberate narrative choice to highlight the antagonist's instability, the 25-year-old insisted, “It was to tell the audience that an animal is coming; if you thought Ranbir was this way, you can expect the villain to be [worse].” She further contended that the sequence was crucial in setting up Bobby’s character and the film’s preoccupation with violence.
“I would not wish for that to happen at my wedding ever!” Mansi added. However, the Pathaan actor was not shocked by her scene’s negative reception. “[I] completely get where people are coming from…[but] it was not the intent to show that any sort of assault was happening. It was just that Bobby sir did not expect his brother’s death news to come at the wedding, which puts the character into a zone where he couldn’t think straight,” she explained.
Tying it with Animal’s central theme, Mansi continued, “Animal instincts are unpredictable instincts. So he goes into that zone, and to vent out his emotions, he comes to his wives. I don’t think it was intended to be any sort of assault. I didn’t feel it on the set or in the script. That was not the case. It was just a relationship between two people that panned out the way it did.”
The actor expressed her admiration for Bobby’s acting in the scene and insisted that the couple was in love. “If you see the scene before that, the wedding scene, if you see the sort of chemistry that we have, the eye contact that we have…It tells you the back-story, that besides their differences, their age, their careers, they do love each other, and that’s why they’re getting married.” As per Mansi, while she denies any depiction of assault, it is cinema’s duty to capture such relationships on the big screen because “there are people who are doing these things to their wives”.
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