Anupriya Goenka recalls feeling ‘violated’ shooting intimate scenes with co-stars

Actress Anupriya Goenka, who recently starred Hindi spy thriller flick Berlin, has recalled a few times her male co-stars crossed the line with her set. During a conversation with Siddharth Kannan, Goenka disclosed two incidents – one where a co-star got “excited” performing an intimate scene with her, and another where the co-star placed his hands on her lower back.

The 37-year-old said, “Once, I wouldn’t say that the person was taking advantage of me; rather, an excitement took over. I could see that he was getting excited, which is not the way it should be. Then you feel a little violated and uncomfortable. These incidents happened during kissing scenes. In another instance, I was wearing clothes that weren’t comfortable. I had expected that he (the co-star), as a man, would know that holding a woman by her waist is easier in such scenes. But he almost put his hands on my butt, which wasn’t required. He could have put his hands on my waist. I felt it was not right.”

Elaborating on the latter, she said, “Later, I moved his hands slightly up (to the waist) and told him to hold there and not below. But at that moment, it felt… I couldn't question him about why he did that, because he would have simply said it was a mistake. I couldn’t call him out at that time. But I told him, ‘In the next take, don’t do this, rather do this.’ He then adhered to that. With kissing scenes, you can kiss softly, but sometimes they just go at you, and that’s too much to take.”

Goenka started her career in 2013, making her debut in the Telugu film Potugadu. Since then, she has starred in films such as Dishoom, Tiger Zinda Hai, Padmaavat, and War.