Daily Times

Bollywood A-lister Shahid Kapoor addressed the debate around his character of an aggressive lover in Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s ‘Kabir Singh’, calling it a depiction of real life.

While he found a lot of his acts to be ‘unacceptable’, Shahid Kapoor argues that his titular character in ‘Kabir Singh’ was based on reality and people like him exist, therefore, it was a good subject for the film.

Reflecting on the debate around the character, Kapoor said in a new interview, “It is not really about who I am. It is about who we all can be. Who we all choose to be. What we all want to be and your learning has to be from that, right?”

“You cannot make films that are never addressing what is happening in life,” he asserted. “I don’t think a lot of things that Kabir did was acceptable at all. I would not accept a guy like that,” admitted the ‘Padmaavat’ actor. “But do guys like that exist? Do girls like that fall in love with guys like that? Yes, they do! So why can’t we make a movie about it?”

“You walk away, you decide what you like what you don’t like. That’s really up to you, as an audience,” he maintained. Notably, the Bollywood debut of South Indian filmmaker Sandeep Reddy Vanga, ‘Kabir Singh’ was the remake of his Vijay Deverakonda-led Telugu title ‘Arjun Reddy’. It starred Shahid Kapoor with Kiara Advani in the lead roles. The romance drama opened to mixed reviews from critics, particularly negative ones for glamorizing misogyny and toxic masculinity, however, it was a major commercial success, emerging as the third-highest-grossing Bollywood film of the year.