Animal: Mansi Taxak breaks silence on marital rape scene in Ranbir Kapoor film; defends how Bobby Deol's character acted

Mansi Taxak has reacted to the backlash over her violent wedding scene in Animal. She plays one of Bobby Deol's three wives in the Sandeep Reddy Vanga film.

Mansi Taxak seemingly defended the marital rape scene in her film Animal and said that Bobby Deol's character was in an 'unpredictable' mood after he learnt of his brother's death. In an interview with Zoom Entertainment, Mansi, who played one of the three wives of Bobby's character Abrar Haque, the antagonist in the Ranbir Kapoor-starrer, opened up about the scene in which her character is subjected to marital rape by her husband, played by Bobby.

Animal's Mansi Taxak and Bobby Deol in the wedding scene from the film.

'It was an apt way to establish Bobby Deol’s character'

She said, “It is shocking, of course. Nobody expects their wedding to end that way. When the wedding sequence starts, if you see the lights, 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. It was to tell the audience that and animal is coming; if you thought Ranbir (Ranbir Kapoor) was this way, you can expect the villain to be (worse). It was an apt way to establish Bobby sir’s character and to show the audience what real animal we’re talking about... I would not wish that to happen at my wedding ever!”

Bobby Deol in a still from Animal.

Mansi says intent wasn't to show any sort of assault

Mansi denied that any assault happened in the scene, but admitted that Abrar was ‘filled with animal instincts’ in the scene, which prompted him to vent his frustrations on his new wife. In the wedding scene, after Abrar is informed about the death of his brother, he first kills the messenger, and then goes on to publicly assault Mansi’s character, his youngest wife, on her wedding day. The scene has been slammed by a section of the audience for promoting violence against women.

Admitting she 'completely gets where people are coming from', Mansi said, that was not the intent. The actor said, "It was not the intent to show that any sort of assault was happening. It was just that Bobby sir (Bobby Deol) did not expect his brother’s death news to come on the wedding, which puts the character into a zone where he couldn’t think straight. And that’s what we’re talking about, right? 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 has panned out the way it did.”

More about Animal

Directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga and starring Ranbir Kapoor, Rashmika Mandanna, Bobby Deol, Anil Kapoor and Triptii Dimri, among others, Animal was released on December 1. The film, which has come under fire for its depiction of toxic masculinity and misogyny, has been doing extremely well in India and worldwide.

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