There’s no stopping Samantha Ruth Prabhu 2.0

Samantha Ruth Prabhu’s face card is immaculate. I notice this on a Friday morning, when we are on the set of The Nod’s May cover shoot in Mumbai, and the star is getting ready for her first shot. The hairstylist on duty today, Mitesh Rajani, has just put her hair in a high pony-braid, and Savleen Manchanda is busy working a brush on her face. We say our hellos and chit-chat about activewear, polyglotism, and the sweltering Mumbai heat. At some point, the topic moves on to her upcoming film, and someone in the room asks, “Who’s the hero?” Samantha simply says, “I don’t do those kinds of films anymore.” I can’t help but grin.

In an hour, the oversized jersey and denim cutoff shorts she’s wearing will be replaced by a chartreuse David Koma blouse that sits somewhere between the slime green from our Brat era to the highlighter yellow we used in school, which today she’s paired with tailored black shorts. But even when her face is veiled—wrapped inside a silken green cloth fluttering midair—she looks like a fantasy. Her movement is unfettered. Her legs look glorious. Samantha, as they say, is giving.

It’s an observation that becomes more evident with every passing shot. When she changes into a Krésha Bajaj look that has more strands of pearls than one can count, I watch her do the only acceptable thing that any normal human being would in a dress like that—swish, leap, and twist—but with a grace that us mortals can hardly mimic. It’s majestic to behold.

When we meet again a week later at her Hyderabad home—a sprawling duplex in the financial district—we are sipping on ginger and peppermint tea on a dark brown marble-top dining table on the upper floor of her apartment. Outside, the summer sun is at its highest point and natural light is pouring in from the skylight, pooling in a rectangle on the floor next to us. Inside, Gelato, her grey Persian cat, ambles around with her tail flicking, blending into the industrial grey walls.

It’s been a busy seven days for the star, between promotions and shooting patchwork for her upcoming film Maa Inti Bangaaram, which releases next month. I return to the statement she made in the dressing room about the kind of films she doesn’t do anymore. “What I meant is that the story will be the hero in the movies that I do. The story is bigger than the producer, bigger than the actors in it.” It isn’t about occupying the lead role on the top of the call sheet, she explains. In her career, Samantha has, in several of her biggest films, played characters orbiting male superstars, like Mahesh Babu in Dookudu (2011), Nani in SS Rajamouli’s Eega (2012), and Ram Charan in Rangasthalam (2017), and knows all too well that female characters are often relegated to the role of a catalyst in the male protagonist’s journey, to propel his emotional arc as a narrative device. She, however, counterbalanced them with more textured roles, such as the journalist and storyteller Madhuravani in Mahanati (2018), the emotionally complex Vaembu in the cult neo-noir Super Deluxe (2019), and the 70-year-old trapped in a younger body as Swathi in Oh! Baby (2019).

“I want a fair representation of women in society,” she tells me. “I want to be part of films where women who are watching can relate to the characters…where they feel seen.” That conviction is also what made her start her production company, Tralala Moving Pictures, in 2023 with husband Raj Nidimoru (one half of filmmaker duo Raj & DK), Himank Duvvuru, as partners. “You can either complain and ask for change on the sidelines and do the same things, or you can be a part of that change and take more risks,” she says. “I might succeed, I might not. But there is only one way to do this.”

Samantha is firmly undergoing Season 2 Weight Loss. Not actual, physical weight loss, but in the Harry Styles kind of way (refer to his album Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally) of “coming back stronger”, a personal reinvention of sorts. Since her myositis diagnosis in 2022, an autoimmune condition that causes muscle weakness, fatigue, and pain, Samantha has been on a break from filming, though you probably wouldn’t have known with the frequency of her annual drops: Since 2010, she’s been in over 50 films, but the last was a little cameo in Subham last year.

The diagnosis forced her to slow down and taught her a lesson at peak fame that she will never forget. Now at 39, she knows she’s no longer in her ingénue phase, so movies like Maa Inti Bangaaram feel special. “I have done comedy and action separately, but never mixed both together,” the multihyphenate says of the upcoming action drama directed by Nandini Reddy. “Usually, when a film is led by a woman, it always has a bit of a social angle attached to it, which makes it quite serious. We stayed away from those typical associations with a female-led film and tried to keep it extremely fun and something that the whole family will enjoy.” Initially, the film’s logline likened it to a desi Kill Bill, but Samantha assures me it’s a lot more family-friendly than Tarantino’s blood fest.

Samantha is seated in a cropped denim shirt, black flared pyjamas, and fuzzy black Louis Vuitton slides. She’s sitting cross-legged on the chair in front of me, fresh-faced with her hair pulled back into a ponytail. She could be anybody: an off-duty actor, a serial entrepreneur, a fierce investor, a chatty podcast host, an audacious producer. And you know what, she is all those things. Growing up in Chennai as the youngest of three siblings, acting wasn’t part of the plan for the model student. During her gap year after college, the then 21-year-old dabbled in modelling and ended up at a film audition for kicks. “I thought if I do get it, I’ll do it for a year and then go back to studying,” she says. “The idea was to do it temporarily, never make it a career. I’m sure my teachers were disappointed when I became an actor. I think some of them still are,” she laughs.

I’m not the first one to ask her what her alternative career would be, but this time she has an answer: “I’m doing it now,” she says with excitement. “I think this entrepreneurial journey is what I’ve always wanted to do.” And much like her accidental foray into acting, her new role as a serial entrepreneur and brand revivalist also came unplanned. After 12 years of non-stop work, it all came to a dead stop with her health diagnosis. “I assumed at that point in time that my career as an actor would not have an expiry date,” she admits. “You tend to get too comfortable... You think there’s no way this is ever going to end. But everything came to a grinding halt.”

I was just so focused on running this race for which I don’t even know what the prize at the finish line was.”

Samantha’s mother had to move in with her. Day after day, there were doctors’ appointments with no certain timeline for recovery. When her doctors advised dedicating her time to hobbies, she didn’t know what to do. “I was like, acting is my hobby. Most people might have something they’re equally good at, but I had zero capabilities outside of acting,” she says. She understood how singularly consumed she had been by her work. “I remembered all those times people around me told me to go on a holiday or find something that I’m passionate about, but I was just so focused on running this race for which I don’t even know what the prize at the finish line was.” Looks like Gen Z got something right, after all.

She recalls when she and Himank Duvvuru, who was her agent at the time, were sitting at the very table we’re having this conversation over, mulling on what her next step could be. “It was almost like I was not coming back. I remember telling Himank at one point: if I do get out of this, I’m going to do things so differently. I realised all the checklists that I was so eager to tick off weren’t my own. They were checklists made for me by other people.”

On her first day back to work after a two-year hiatus, she walked away from over a dozen brand deals overnight. “Those were hard decisions, because as an actor your own brand value is associated with endorsing these names as well. But I couldn’t endorse them and, at the same time, invest in brands that I truly believe in,” she says. “It does not work that way.” With Duvvuru, she began reassessing what it meant to lend her name.

Today, Samantha’s entrepreneurial portfolio straddles beauty, wellness, fashion, food, and sport, and each venture feels tethered to her deeply personal point of view. She is co-founder of Secret Alchemist, a clean perfume brand born, in part, out of her own struggle. “I had to stop using perfume for two years because I would get migraines and allergies,” she shares. Around the same time, she met the founders of Secret Alchemist, then an aromatherapy-led botanical hair and skincare brand, and together they began exploring the idea to pivot to clean perfumery. In January, Secret Alchemist raised $3 million in a seed funding round led by Unilever Ventures.

That momentum has since expanded into a constellation of ventures: Gataca, a nutraceutical company that focuses on longevity; Zoy, a menstrual health brand; relaunching activewear brand Mile Collective; and launching her fashion label Truly SMA earlier this year. All of this in addition to acting and producing, overseeing the Ekam Early Learning Center, co-owning the Chennai Super Champs pickleball team, and running Pratyusha Support, an NGO she founded in 2014 to provide medical and financial aid to underserved women and children. If the list already weren’t long enough, she is also a key investor in UrbanKisaan, a Hyderabad-based agri-tech startup, and Nourish You, a plant-based packaged foods label, as well as the host of Take 20, her health podcast that invites doctors and health experts to talk about wellness, biohacking, and clean living.

It all sounds impossibly ambitious—there are, after all, only 24 hours in a day—but Samantha assures me she’s no superhero. “I have incredible, incredible co-founders and teams. They’re so good at what they do,” she says. “I think maybe my secret weapon is that I’m a great judge of people and I surround myself with people who are more intelligent than I am. That’s half the work done,” she says.

Despite having what sounds like one of the busiest schedules on Earth, she is often the first to respond on the 25 WhatsApp groups she’s on. “I think when you are extremely passionate about what you’re doing, it really doesn’t feel like work,” she explains. Still, she must feel stretched thin on a taffy puller, right? But she insists it isn’t as hectic as it sounds. “There hasn’t been a single day since the time I came back to work that I’ve felt drained or exhausted. My questions will start at 7 am, because I’m so excited when I’m discussing products and the direction.”

Six days a week, Samantha also makes time to hit the gym. Looking at her physique, it’s time well spent. She clocks in eight hours of sleep, which she’s tracking on her Oura ring. She has a body-sized red light therapy panel at her home in Mumbai that she had originally purchased to help alleviate the inflammation and pain caused by myositis but has now become her staple. “It has so many other benefits. It makes your skin better. Your hair is better. You have more sustained energy throughout the day because of ATP production,” she explains, comparing it to the hour-long high of an espresso shot. Like her work schedule, her off-duty schedule seems inexhaustible. She swears by sauna and acupuncture. “And I love everything alternative medicine,” she adds.

If she’s in a good place now, by her admission, it hasn’t been a smooth ride. “I was always someone who would imagine the worst,” she explains. “But when I started meditation and writing this gratitude diary, it did make a change. I know that people say this is so woo-woo, but I’ve seen it work,” she says, explaining that it was her therapist who nudged her to journal. Her millennial mindset reveals itself sometimes, like when her doctor first suggested she go see a therapist. “I was like, just give me the medicine and send me back to work. Why do I need therapy? I’m absolutely fine,” she recounts. “We’re all like that. We think we’re too strong, too cool. We don’t need help.” Turns out, it was exactly what she needed.

In the beginning, her diary was very dark. “It was like the Burn Book. I was like, this is the worst phase of my life. I hate it all.” One fine day, she decided to flip the script and write only positive thoughts down despite not feeling her best. “I was like, okay, this is crap. I can’t be so negative. It would kill me every time I wrote ‘my life is amazing, I’m good, I’m happy, today is amazing’ because it wasn’t true. But I swear, three months in, I didn’t have to fake it. I was genuinely feeling better.” Of course, it wasn’t just magical thinking that pulled her out of the rut; she credits the shift in mindset to be one of the biggest agents of change. “I was in the exact place that I was three months ago, but I was able to look at things a little more positively.”

More than once, I’ve heard she carries affirmation cards everywhere. Is that true? Samantha gets up, walks to the other end of the table, and pulls a pack out of her dark green Hermès tote with a Twilly wrapped around the handle. “I have many more at home,” she says, shaking the box of cards in her hand. “People keep giving me these as gifts now, so I keep changing them.” I ask if she’s pulled a card today, and she shuffles the deck and plucks one out. Today’s affirmation is “Make more time for things that make your heart smile.” She smiles and says she’s already doing that: making more time for her pets. (Besides Gelato, she also shares her home with a Blue American Bully called Saasha and a French bulldog called Hash.) “She’s really smart and special,” she says proudly, petting Saasha on her head. Gelato, meanwhile, has made her way atop the island counter in the open-plan kitchen. Hash, who Samantha co-parents with her ex-husband, is currently at his other home. “He spends some time with me, and some time there. He just went a day ago and I’m already like ‘I want him back’,” she laughs. “Saasha sits at the door waiting for him to come back. She was a baby when she came and grew up with him, so in her head he’s her everything.”

I ask her if there is anything she can’t do now, and Saasha gets up on cue and runs to the terrace to bark at the man cleaning the pool outside. “Swimming is one thing I’ve tried so many times, but this is something I just cannot do,” Samantha says sheepishly. “My brothers are five and six years older than me, and they learned to swim by jumping into a well. So, they assumed that I would learn the same way. Clearly, I did not. And I think that fear has just stuck.”

Another thing she struggles with, she points out, is watching her old work. “I don’t know what that is about—whether I feel a bit embarrassed or think I could have done better,” she says, but it’s something she’s trying to overcome after watching Justin Bieber perform at Coachella recently. “It was incredible,” she says of his set, for which over a hundred million people worldwide—including Samantha and I—tuned in. “It made me wonder if he can accept all ages, all parts, all phases of himself, it’s maybe something I should try too. We all struggle with accepting ourselves entirely. Watching him made me think that this is something that I still probably haven’t dealt with.” She is also in awe of Madonna, who returned to the Coachella stage at age 67, in the exact costume she wore onstage 20 years ago. “Of course, the comments were ruthless, but I think that what she did was incredible.”

Our time together is over, but Samantha still has a couple more interviews scheduled today, pointing to the stack of papers in front of her, which includes a document in Telugu. As fluent as she is, Samantha still finds it hard to switch back sometimes, so a little help is welcome. Tomorrow, they will be shooting the last of the patchwork for Maa Inti Bangaaram and the week after is Samantha’s birthday, which she plans to spend with her fans. “There’s a bunch of fans who’ve been with me since the very beginning. I usually meet them around my birthday, but this time I thought I’d meet them on my birthday. So, that’ll be fun.”

For most of us, summer holidays are still being discussed and dismissed, but Samantha says she plans to go on a silent retreat for seven days, something she’s been doing at the Isha Yoga Center every three months for the past year. “I’m now old,” she jokes. “I mean, it might be boring for some, but wellness retreats are my favourite kind of holiday,” she continues. “You can’t talk, use your phone, read...nothing. Initially, it’s a little hard, but I feel like something is off when I don’t do it every three months. I am really looking forward to it. It’s like a restart.”

Editorial Direction: Megha Mahindru, Ridhima Sapre. DOP: Jeff Wangyu. Visual and Creative Direction: Jay Modi. Art Direction: Harry Iyer. Bookings Editor: Nikita Moses. Set Design: Nikita Rao. Multimedia Designer: Mehak Jindal. Visual Editor: Ria Rawat. Makeup: Savleen Manchanda. Hair: Mitesh Rajani. Assistants: Jean (Photo); Kashish Jain (Style), Rishita Hindocha (Hair), Delisha S (Makeup). Production: Imran Khatri Production, Radhika Chemburkar, Vishal Baniya