R Madhavan may have charmed an entire generation with Rehnaa Hai Terre Dil Mein (RHTDM, 2001), but he’s well aware that his character, Maddy, hasn’t aged well in today’s context. As the cult romantic film turns 24 this year, Madhavan gears up for his next release, Aap Jaisa Koi, where he plays an ageing man grappling with love and the burden of patriarchal conditioning.

Ask him how the portrayal of men with a patriarchal mindset has evolved on screen over the years, and he responds candidly: “If you look back at any Hindi film hero, you’ll find that he is completely flawed. That’s how Indian culture has been represented. There is no actor in the Hindi film industry whose one film or the other is not about toxic masculinity. Don’t single out RHTDM — take any film before that. Any hero who has slapped or abused a woman on screen is toxic. Name one who hasn’t. If you look at it retrospectively, you’ll only confuse yourself.”

Madhavan urges audiences to view such characters through the lens of the times in which they were created: “What were the circumstances when a guy fell in love back then? You didn’t have bars where people met, or mobile phones to get in touch. In villages, you met potential partners during social functions like weddings or festivals. Even in cities, it wasn’t easy to connect. If I saw a beautiful girl on a train, how would I reach her? Even if my intentions were noble, today it would be considered creepy to keep a letter from her. So our understanding of masculinity needs to evolve with time.”

He even brings up 2000’s Alai Payuthey (remade in Hindi as Saathiya)— another romantic hit that, in hindsight, shows signs of problematic behaviour:

“My character sees a girl at a wedding and doesn’t know how to find her, except that she’s a doctor from Chennai. He does the math: how many girls from that station go to that medical college, and which ones are from her hometown. He narrows it down to 65 girls. Today, you’d call him a stalker. But (filmmaker) Mani Ratnam didn’t see it that way then — it was considered romantic. So even a Mani Ratnam hero, by today’s standards, is flawed.” “And that’s why,” he concludes, “we must judge these characters in context”.