After a smashing ₹100 crore theatrical run with her Telugu film, Maa Inti Bangaaram, and now a bonafide action star, paired with her new pregnancy, actor and producer Samantha Ruth Prabhu has lots to celebrate. She has, however, taken a moment to look back at what two years of illness taught her, after she was diagnosed with myositis, a chronic autoimmune condition.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter India as our September cover star, Samantha opened up about the health crisis that forced a fundamental reckoning with how she had built her sense of self.
"Up until then, I had built my identity on goals, results, performance, discipline — everything was measured by doing. And for the first time, when I was sick, I had to make peace with the fact that I wasn't contributing in any way."
The question that followed, she said, was one she had to sit with for some time. "Who am I when I'm not contributing? I had to build value behind the person who I was, not what I was doing."
She described the experience as a collapse of the kind of confidence she had spent years constructing. "As an actor, you learn to build confidence in the way you walk into any room and people assume you belong there because you exude that confidence. With the way you look, the way you dress, your workouts, your routines — it's carefully built. But when sickness happens to you.... sickness really doesn't care how confident you look."
The illness and its journey left Samantha feeling an overall loss of control. "I felt such a loss of identity when that happened to me. I felt like I had no control."
What followed, Samantha explained, was a gradual process of learning and growing, along with understanding that her response to the situation was something she could still shape, even if the illness itself was not. "It took me a while to understand that I do have control over how I respond to this. I don't have to fake confidence, but there are other lessons I need to learn, which is resilience, faith, hope. These things are important qualities that sickness taught me."
Slowly, the results began to show, she continued. "As a result, everything got better. The way I lived my life, my performance, everything got a lot more... real."
While she does of course wish the illness never happened, she is proud of what the journey taught her. "As much as I'd like to not have gotten this, it taught me lessons that have become an invaluable part of my life."
Samantha also notes that her journey did see ups and downs, acknowledging that she did go through a phase of feeling victimised before arriving at a different outlook towards the situation. "I went through that phase of 'Why me?' It took me a while to get to, 'There's something to learn from this.'"
Despite its challenges, Samantha describes this health journey as the most pivotal period of her life. "That change, and that journey has been the most important journey of my life."
One such learning made her entirely rethink the way she allotted her time to her work. "The time that I gave a project, people, my peace, my health, these have great value, and I should be extremely careful with the projects I give this time of mind to."
But while the number of projects she worked on might have reduced, Samantha knew that was a good thing. "The films that I work on, they have dramatically reduced. But I've had to realign and understand that it might look smaller, but it has become a lot bigger in a very purposeful way. I realised that this is how I'd like to do things here on."
Watch the full interview drop on The Hollywood Reporter India YouTube channel later today.