Radhika Apte Says She's ‘Deeply Disturbed’ by Violence Becoming Mainstream Entertainment

Radhika Apte told The Hollywood Reporter India that she is “deeply disturbed” by the surge of violence and gore dominating Indian screens, arguing that the industry’s accelerating appetite for brutality has begun to eclipse meaningful storytelling. On a temporary break from work after giving birth, Apte offered an unusually candid assessment of what she sees as a post-pandemic drift towards spectacle over substance and its corrosive effect on society.

Her comments arrive at a moment when audiences and industry observers are discussing Dhurandhar, Aditya Dhar’s action spectacle starring Ranveer Singh, Arjun Rampal, Akshaye Khanna and R. Madhavan — a film that has sparked renewed debate about whether mainstream cinema has leaned too heavily into gore as a shorthand for scale.

“I feel quite disturbed, and I have to say this openly,” Apte said. “I’m deeply disturbed by the violence at the moment that is selling as entertainment. I don’t want to be bringing up a child in a world where that’s entertainment. I just cannot deal with it.”

She acknowledged that violent stories have always existed but questioned the industry’s fixation on depicting brutality in explicit detail. “If I want to tell the story of a man who chopped people, I don’t need to see the chopping and the horrible things they’re doing to the person. That’s not storytelling. I’ve not seen it ever,” she said. “The effect of this on society is so large, and I find it deeply upsetting that that’s what’s selling.”

Apte, who has long been associated with independent cinema and complex female roles, said she is increasingly disillusioned with both the creative and ethical compromises demanded of actors. “I’m also a bit bored of acting now in the sense I want to select very few things,” she said. “It takes a lot. You have to be emotionally available, and I don’t want to be emotionally available to people I don’t respect anymore.”

She criticised what she described as an industry culture that celebrates performers for “bringing in their game” to fix poorly written scripts. “People write shoddy scripts. They do one draft and say, ‘Arre, I have a vision.’ I say, no — give it to me on paper. So many scripts, we’ve joined the dots, we’ve put in the work. Characters are half-heartedly written with immense inconsistency and a hundred loopholes. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

Her frustration also extends to the ways women are depicted. “I find it disturbing that actresses are doing films that demean women,” she said. “I think we need to collectively stop doing them. They might be throwing money at you, but you’re rich already. We need to stop because this is very harmful.”

Industry analysts have noted that the post-pandemic theatrical boom has been disproportionately led by hypermasculine, maximalist spectacles that rely on escalating violence to draw crowds back to cinemas. With streaming platforms simultaneously steering towards star-driven titles, performers known for restrained, character-focused work such as Apte have increasingly found themselves squeezed out of both spaces.

For now, Apte seems content to step back, choosing selectivity over compromise. But her warning lands at a moment when Indian cinema is grappling with what exactly it wants violence to mean and what it might cost to keep selling it.