'Sacred Games' actor Elnaaz Norouzi strips in support of Iran's anti-hijab protests: 'Freedom of choice'

Iranian born actor Elnaaz Norouzi, who is known for her work in the Netflix series ‘Sacred Games’, has come out in support of the ongoing anti-hijab protests in her native country. She took to Instagram on Tuesday and posted a video in which she is seen stripping several layers of clothes to make a point that a woman can wear what she wants and no one can stop her.

‘Every woman, anywhere in the world, regardless of where she is from, should have the right to wear whatever she desires and when or wherever she desires to wear it. No man nor any other woman has the right to judge her or ask her to dress otherwise,’ Elnaaz wrote in the post.

‘Everyone has different views and beliefs and they have to be respected. Democracy means the power to decide...Every Woman should have the power to decide over her own body. I am not promoting nudity, I am promoting freedom of choice,’ she added.

Earlier, in a conversation with RJ Siddharth Kannan, Elnaaz talked about her own experience with the morality police in Iran. She recalled, ‘What happened to Mahsa Amini, that morality police captured her on the roads, this happened to me as well in Tehran. This happens to women every day. What happened to her could have happened to me as well, or can happen to any other woman tomorrow. So we need to change something.’

Elnaaz said that only her family knew about this incident until she opened up about it. She mentioned the morality police took her to an undisclosed location and revealed that she managed to escape them as she played smart, and had two phones.

She said that she gave them her German number and updated her family with her Iranian phone number. Her family then sought help from their contacts on the inside to help her.

‘I went to this 're-education centre,' they call it so. I didn't know where it was, I didn't have the address. They take your phone. Mahsa must have resisted, and they must have hit her head so much that she went into a coma and died. (At re-education centre), They take all of your information, they take your ID. They take pictures of you like you are in a prison. They made me write my name, take pictures from all the angles in the clothes that you had on. Then they tell you 'if we catch you again with the wrong type of clothing, it won't be this easy’, she said.

22-year-old Mahsa Amini was detained by the morality police last month for not properly covering her hair with a hijab. She collapsed at a police station and died three days later.

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