Actor Siddharth Shaw played the character of Arun, a newlywed husband who rapes her wife, played by Prasanna Bisht, repeatedly after marriage, in the web series Chiraiya. He admits that the portrayal is bringing him a lot of hate, but he is enjoying that. “People want to put me in a blue drum, and I recently only got to know that reference. That is from the women’s perspective,” he says, referencing to the gruesome murder case in Meerut from March 2025 where a man’s dismembered body was found sealed inside a blue plastic drum.
He adds, “From the men’s perspective, the hate which I’m getting is mostly expletives which are coming up. And then there are these reels or videos or mails where people reach out and say that it was going on really well, and then the whole male community was silenced. I’m so happy to see so much hate because it’s stemming from a space of love only for me. This guy is hated to that level, that means I’ve done my job well.”
The actor asserts that shooting the intimate scenes brought in a lot of mental distress for him. “The first day when we shot intimacy for suhagrat, we were doing the first take and I literally howled for five minutes. We stopped shooting as I was just crying there. Everybody was just trying to calm me down and be like, ‘hey, it’s all right’. I had taken so much tension and anxiety that because of my stress, my lower back had completely froze. I used to limp while shooting,” he says.
Siddharth Shaw shares that the mental toll was quite heavy on him. “For six months, I had so much anxiety because this was not a lovemaking intimate scene, this was a rape sequence. So the dynamics completely changed in that space. When I went ahead and shot the honeymoon sequence, I got a panic attack right after shooting. And when I saw the sequence, my family could not watch the sequence,” he says.
Commenting on the public discourse around the show, with people calling it an ‘anti men propaganda’, Siddharth says, “I believe as artistes and as filmmakers, our onus, our responsibility lies on starting a discourse, start a discussion about whatever things are happening in society, good, bad, evil, ugly. So when I talk to people in purview of Chiraiya and the kind of discourse which it has sparked today online and in drawing room conversations, I personally feel that our job is done. I feel it is great that people are voicing things like this as well. When they feel that this is a propaganda, then there are counter replies to those people by the audience themselves.”
