Mansi Taxak claimed that Bobby Deol’s character was acting in an “unpredictable” manner following his brother’s death, and she appeared to justify the scene of marital rape in her movie Animal. During an interview with Zoom Entertainment, Mansi, who portrayed one of Bobby’s three wives, Abrar Haque, the antagonist in the Ranbir Kapoor film, addressed the scene where her character is raped by her husband, Bobby.
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 and the way the art was done, it is 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 an animal is coming; if you thought Ranbir (Ranbir Kapoor) was this way, you could 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!”
Mansi agreed that Abrar was “filled with animal instincts” during the incident, which caused him to vent his anger on his new bride, but he disputed that any assault had occurred. In the wedding scene, after learning of his brother’s passing, Abrar assassinates the messenger before publicly attacking Mansi’s character, his youngest wife, on her wedding day. Some viewers have criticised the scene for encouraging violence against women.
That was not the intention, Mansi conceded, adding that she ‘fully gets where people are coming from’. The actor stated, “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 at 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.”
Further on Animal
Animal, which was helmed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga and starred Triptii Dimri, Bobby Deol, Rashmika Mandanna, Anil Kapoor, and Ranbir Kapoor among others, was released on December 1. The film has been doing incredibly well in India and around the world, despite drawing criticism for its portrayal of toxic masculinity and misogyny.
