Actor Pavail Gulati gets his big Bollywood break as Taapsee Pannu's on-screen husband in Anubhav Sinha's upcoming film "Thappad", and he says that working with the maker helped him to gain confidence as an actor.

"Anubhav (Sinha) sir allows actors to make mistakes and give inputs in the creative process. If I do something wrong, he won't humiliate me. I would say that it helped me to gain my confidence as an actor. Usually, sir does not cast any actor without auditioning but I am the lucky one who has been cast as one of the leads in his film! Initially, I was a little sceptical because he has that aura of a serious man," Pavail told IANS.

"He is a well-built, well-read man, and has made serious films like ‘Article 15' and ‘Mulk', and I thought what if he intimidates me? I was a little nervous. I have to say he is younger than me at heart!" smiled the 21-year-old actor.

"Thappad" features Taapsee Pannu and Pavail with Kumud Mishra, Ratna Pathak Shah, Tanvi Azmi, Dia Mirza, and Ram Kapoor, among others. The film, slated to release on February 28, revolves around a young married couple and how one day, when the wife is slapped by the husband in front of guests at a house party, the incident triggers off a chain reaction that lead to self-realisation for her, leading to her walking out of the marriage. Pavail is cast as the career-obsessed husband who misbehaves in public with his wife, essayed by Taapsee.

On taking up such a role with negative shades, he said: "It was risky for me. People might just dislike me because I play a character who slaps a woman. But once I started reading the script, I realised that he is a victim of the situation too. This film shows both sides of the story, on why we often take our loved ones for granted and how social conditioning is responsible for our actions. It questions many age-old practices."

Pavail says although we tend to associate domestic violence mostly with the lower class, that is not always the case. "The fact is, when domestic violence happens in an educated family, keeping the ‘duniyadari' in mind, such families of the high society do not talk about it openly, as it is a taboo, and because they have to maintain the image of an ideal family. In lower economic strata, like everything else, they talk about domestic violence very openly. That is why we tend to think that the house help faces domestic violence and not any members of our family. But living in denial is not the solution," explained the actor, who was also recently appeared in the Netflix anthology "Ghost Stories".