The Mardaani franchise, headlined by Rani Mukerji and produced by Aditya Chopra’s Yash Raj Films, is best known for its ferocious antagonists who make the mission of top cop Shivani Shivaji Roy an uphill battle. In the first two instalments, the makers kept the antagonist card close to their chest, only revealing fleeting glimpses in the trailer.
Mardaani 3 marks the first time that they chose to disclose the antagonist Amma, the head of a human trafficking racket, in the trailer itself. Another departure from the previous two instalments was writing a woman antagonist, played by seasoned theatre artist Mallika Prasad, who also teaches acting. “It’s such a powerful move. One of the crucial things the franchise has done is to flip around the villain. Thus far, Shivani Shivaji Roy is beating up the man who’s responsible for crimes against women. But this flip to a woman 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, unrestricted and unaccounted for, corrupts whoever is holding it, whether it’s a man or a woman. It’s not binary,” she adds. Does a woman antagonist in a franchise like Mardaani also imply that it’s also the women who perpetuate crimes against other women? Mallika interrupts mid-sentence and claps back, “No, that’s a man’s story. Bury it before it’s even stated.”
But being a woman also makes the antagonist of Mardaani 3 more complex and layered. Infamous as ‘Amma’, she has motherly instincts of her own, even though on the other hand, she weaponizes those very instincts to lure young girls into her dhandha. “That makes us think about our nature as human beings. So 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 kids, shows them a brighter future of samundar or freedom, drugs them, and takes something away from them. To an extent, all of us are like that. When it comes to our own, we’re all motherly. But otherwise we’re the perfect monster,” says Mallika.
*Spoiler alert* Mallika also points out that her motherly instincts are rather intertwined with her business because even when she adopts a boy, she turns him into another monster, a more ambitious and ruthless one at that. “She adopts him because she sees the same grit and unhingedness in him. She’s actually creating a global second line. I don’t know too many women who are that smart these days. And she’s a woman from the streets. I’m actually very proud of Amma,” says Mallika. *Spoiler alert ends*
She insists that I quote her on that last sentence even though it could go very well against her. That’s because as a theatre actor and a teacher of acting herself, Mallika places empathy at the top of the list of virtues. “She has fought her way up from bondage. God knows what she did to that dalal she worked for. Her rise is the power she had to pay for the power she holds now,” says the actor, adding, “When you see somebody rise from nothing, you’ll recognize that it couldn’t have been for nothing. You realize the toll it took on them. That’s where you get empathy from a character so different from your own life.”
But the empathy for Amma doesn’t prevent her from cracking what she admittedly admits is a bad pun. “Her ‘organs’ were removed and ‘donated’ when she was just 13, but that’s when she rose through the ranks to become the don of an ‘organized’ crime. Sorry, I needed to crack that bad joke. But I admire her journey from rising from the ground and now running a kingdom on fear,” says Mallika.
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Like her character, Mallika has also hustled her way into the film industry. She landed an audition for Mardaani 3 when casting director Shanoo Sharma spotted 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’ve gotten even my earlier work on the basis of my previous work. When I sent the self-tape, she said she hadn’t seen anything like that in a long time. That made me really happy,” says Mallika, smiling.
She credits Shanoo and Aditya Chopra as the reasons “why I’m here today”. Aditya Chopra famously told Vishal Jethwa, who played the antagonist Sunny in Gopi Puthran’s Mardaani 2, that he has to match up to the great actor that Rani is. But his feedback for Mallika’s performance was fairly minimal. “He gave me no notes. He loved what I did,” she says, adding that she feels “very happy” to stand in the same pantheon of Mardaani villains as Jethwa and Tahir Raj Bhasin from the inaugural part, which released back in 2014.
However, unlike those men, Mallika didn’t get a chance to share the frame with Rani. Even the limited scenes they shot together were done using stand-ins. “That’s actually something you have to learn to do, to stay within the continuity. Even in your close-ups, many people will stick their hands out for you to talk to them, but I don’t like that. I’d much rather imagine the other character in the empty space there,” confesses Mallika.
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Every Mardaani villain so far has had to fight his way out of being stereotyped as an antagonist. Mallika shares that concern, but is optimistic of experimenting. “Sometimes, that’s the journey an actor also crafts. But there have been people who’ve done a very different thing from their last one. Like Fahadh Faasil does a negative role, then the lead role, and then even a minor role. But there’s an expansiveness to an actor who’s exploring different characters. I imagine I want to do that too. Sometimes, the same story told by somebody else will be a completely new world,” she says, signing off with those glinting Amma eyes.
