The Mardaani franchise, headed by Rani Mukerji and produced by Aditya Chopra’s Yash Raj Films, is best known for its fierce antagonists who make the mission of Senior Constable Shivani Shivaji Roy an uphill battle. In the first two installations, the creators kept the antagonist’s card close to their chest, revealing only fleeting glimpses in the trailer.
Mardaani 3 It marks the first time they have chosen to reveal the antagonist Amma, the head of a human trafficking racket, in the trailer itself. Another departure from the previous two installations was writing a female antagonist, played by seasoned theater artist Mallika Prasad, who also teaches acting. “It’s such a powerful move. One of the crucial things the franchise has done is to turn the villain around. So far, Shivani Shivaji Roy is beating up the man responsible for crimes against women. But this turn towards a female antagonist is very interesting,” Mallika tells SCREEN in an exclusive interview.
Rani Mukerji as Shivani Shivaji Roy in Mardaani 3.
“It says that evil is gender neutral. Power, unfettered and unaccounted for, corrupts whoever holds it, whether a man or a woman. It is not binary,” he adds. Does a female antagonist in a franchise like Mardaani also imply that it is women who perpetuate crimes against other women? Mallika interrupts mid-sentence and replies, “No, that’s a man’s story. Bury it before it’s told.”
But being a woman also makes Mardaani 3’s antagonist more complex and layered. Known as ‘Amma’, she has her own maternal instincts, although on the other hand, she uses those same instincts as a weapon to attract young girls to her. dhandha. “That makes us think about our nature as human beings. As long as it’s our child, it’s the mother’s instinct. But everything else is about profit. So, she finds a way to manipulate the other children, shows them a better future of samundar or freedom, drugs them and takes something away from them. To some extent, we are all like that. When it comes to ourselves, we are all motherly. But otherwise we are the perfect monster,” says Mallika.
*Spoiler alert* Mallika also points out that her maternal instincts are quite intertwined with her business because even when she adopts a child, she turns him into another monster, more ambitious and ruthless. “She adopts him because she sees the same courage and madness in him. In fact, she is creating a second global line. I don’t know many women who are so intelligent today. And she is a woman of the street. In fact, I am very proud of Amma,” says Mallika. *Spoiler alert ends*
She insists that I quote her in that last sentence, even though it could go against her. This is because, as a theater actress and acting teacher, Mallika places empathy at the top of the list of virtues. “She has fought her way out of slavery. God knows what she did to that Dalal she worked for. His rise is the power he had to pay for the power he holds now,” says the actor, adding: “When you see someone emerge from nowhere, you recognize that it couldn’t have been in vain. You realize the toll it took on them. That’s where you get empathy from a character so different from your own life.”
But empathy for Amma doesn’t stop him from deciphering what he admits is a bad pun. “Her ‘organs’ were harvested and ‘donated’ when she was just 13, but that’s when she rose through the ranks to become the boss of an ‘organized’ crime. Sorry, I needed to tell that tasteless joke. But I admire her journey from rising from the earth to now running a kingdom based on fear,” says Mallika.
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Like her character, Mallika also made her way in the film industry. She landed an audition for Mardaani 3 when casting director Shanoo Sharma saw her playing Zubeida in Abhishek Chaubey’s 2024 black comedy thriller show Killer Soup on Netflix India. “Shanoo told me this two days ago when I asked her. I even got my previous job based on my previous job. When I sent her the tape, she said she hasn’t seen something like this in a long time. That made me very happy,” says Mallika, smiling.
She credits Shanoo and Aditya Chopra for the reasons “why I am here today.” Aditya Chopra told Vishal Jethwa, who played the antagonist Sunny in Gopi Puthran’s Mardaani 2, that he has to live up to the great actor that Rani is. But his comments on Mallika’s performance were quite minimal. “He didn’t give me any notes. He loved what I did,” he says, adding that he feels “very happy” to be in the same pantheon of Mardaani villains as Jethwa and Tahir Raj Bhasin from the inaugural part, which released in 2014.
However, unlike those men, Mallika did not get the opportunity to share the frame with Rani. Even the limited scenes they filmed together were done with doubles. “Actually, that’s something you have to learn to do, to stay within the continuity. Even in the close-ups, a lot of people reach out to you to talk to them, but I don’t like that. I prefer to imagine the other character in the empty space there,” Mallika confesses.
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Until now, all of Mardaani’s villains have had to fight to not be stereotyped as antagonists. Mallika shares that concern, but is optimistic about experimenting. “Sometimes, that is the journey that an actor also takes. But there have been people who have done something very different from the previous one. Like Fahadh Faasil plays a negative role, then the lead role and then even a minor role. But there is a breadth in an actor who explores different characters. I imagine I want to do that too. Sometimes, the same story told by someone else will be a whole new world,” he says, bidding farewell with those sparkling eyes of Amma.