With their magnum opus Padmaavat bringing in generous applause and box office collections, Ranveer Singh is opening up about the controversy like never before. The actor, whose role as Alauddin Khilji has found considerable appreciation, still sounds disturbed by the threats from radical elements to chop off leading lady Deepika Padukone’s nose and the vandalizing of cinema halls.

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“I was filled with pain,” he reveals of this entire period. “There is no doubt about that and I had a very strong urge to act out, speak out but I was given strict instructions not to and I had to respect that because I was not at the forefront of this fight. It is the prerogative of the producers, of the director. If they were explicitly telling me that me saying something or doing something is going to complicate things further. I don’t want to complicate the lives; I want to make the lives simpler and do my bit to see that the things go off smoothly and this film gets made and it gets released.’’

Instructed to stay silent as his words could provoke the situation further, he adds, “So, if this is what they are asking me to do, I have to abide by that. But yeah, of course, I was enraged, absolutely enraged. But what could I do? I could choose to act out destructively, but I chose not to. I channelled it and I put all of it into my performance. And whatever you may feel after seeing this performance is born out of having felt a certain way.’’

Those were testing times for him, Deepika and director Sanjay Bhansali but “we were there for each other,” he states. He is particularly proud of their director, saying, “Mr. Bhansali took his time to come out of what he went through understandably. But, hats off to the guy! When he came back, the kind of vigour he came back with on the film’s set, he was a like a man possessed. The way it happened and then there was a large gap where the film was not being shot. There was all this anxiety of what’s going to happen and that period was difficult for me as well. Because I don’t know what was happening. And I am feeling all of these things and I am being told to shut up. So, it was difficult, but we went on the set to complete the film.’’