Deepika Padukone Is Living the Dream

It’s 6 p.m. and Deepika Padukone is in bed. Perched against a mahogany headboard, she’s totally at ease, if not slightly groggy, having just woken from a nap. It’s a totally fitting place to find a new mom, seven months postpartum, eking out whatever time she can to rest as her baby sleeps.

Since bursting onto the scene nearly two decades ago—first in a Kannada-language film and then in Farah Khan’s opus Om Shanti Om—Padukone has always presented as the picture-perfect heroine, a megawatt Movie Star—one with 40-some film credits to her name, who regularly sits on “highest paid actress” lists in India; one-half of Bollywood’s It Couple (her husband is fellow actor Ranveer Singh); a fashion icon, opening the Sabyasachi runway, and holding coveted contracts with luxury brands like Cartier and Louis Vuitton; a social media juggernaut with more than 80 million followers. Someone who is the backbone (along with now-household onscreen names like Shah Rukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas) of a billion dollar Hindi film industry, and for bringing it, and in turn, South Asian culture, to the global stage (see her appearances at Cannes and Oscars and Met Galas, plural, as feathers in her cap).

And yet there she is, on a Wednesday evening in April, appearing on my screen (I’m in California; she’s in India)—a glimpse of her canopy bed with its gauzy cream drapes in the background—in an oversized white tee, black sweats, and a bare face, completely unguarded and ready to talk about a new role she’s just settling into: Deepika the Mom.

“I wouldn't say I'm lost,” she says when asked how she’s handling this transition. “but I wouldn't say I've found [my new identity] either. I feel like I'm navigating it.”

Like many first time moms, Padukone is surrendering to the unknown, the uneasy. The forced go-with-the-flowness and slight chaos that comes with caring for a brand new human who comes without a manual. That nebulous, drifting space between asleep and awake; exhausted and excited; being responsible for someone’s whole existence but also needing to maintain your own self.

With today’s interview she’s faced with an onslaught of feelings and questions about what working as a new mom looks like. She’s not on maternity leave, per se, but she’s also not ready to jump back into the life she led just a couple years ago, which included multiple simultaneous film productions and running a self-care brand, 82°E, alongside a mental health foundation, Live Love Laugh. Right now she works a few days—sometimes baby in tow or nanny on call—and then stays at home for a few days, maximizing bath times and, crucially, nap times with her daughter, Dua.

“I don't know if [work] will be what it used to be before I had a baby, and I don't even know if I want to be that way…is [this] my new routine and schedule?” she asks, seemingly to herself.

She takes a beat and continues on, “Let's see how that evolves.”

While the 39-year-old is comfortable in letting things come together in new ways, the same can’t be said for everyone in her life. She recalls a particularly baffling incident when she recently told a director who wanted to meet that she couldn’t because she had to be home for her baby.

“He turned around and said, ‘Oh, looks like she's taking motherhood very seriously,’” she says, fixing her face into a quizzical expression. “I don't know if that was a compliment or a jab. What does that mean, taking motherhood seriously? Yeah!”

Even with the help of a nanny, family, and the immense privilege she is awarded being one of the world’s most influential people, here, in bed, she sounds like any other new mom trying to find herself and figure it all out. “I do have to tell myself that your life doesn't end the minute you have a child, and that you do need to get back to your life, or at least a part of your life before you had a baby…but every moment where I'm not able to be with her, there is guilt.”

Baby Girl Padukone Singh was born in early September 2024, but Padukone swears it was “just yesterday,” breaking into a tender smile as she remembers holding her for the first time. She reveals that she had a complicated pregnancy (“I went through a lot in the eight, nine months of being pregnant”) and delivery.

It wasn’t until November that Padukone and her husband settled on the name Dua, an Arabic word that means prayer. The parents were in no rush to settle on a moniker that didn’t feel right for their daughter. “I think what was more important for us was to first hold the baby in our arms, allow her to sort of see this new world she's come into, allow her personality to start developing a little bit.

Padukone turned to poetry and music for inspiration. “It felt like a beautiful summary of what she means to us and why she means what she means to us.”

She texted Singh in the middle of the night, while he was on set: Dua? “He said yes, and that was it.”

Two months to pick out a name didn’t feel like a big deal to the actress who has never been one to fixate on timelines. She knew from the age of five when her sister, Anisha, was born and her “maternal instincts kicked in” that she wanted to be a mom. “I think nurturing, protecting comes to me very naturally.”

So it was less about if she’d have a child and more about when. She notes, again, her privilege here that she didn’t face the same kind of familial or societal pressure (or at least was able to tune out any noise that did occur) to start a family by a certain age. She credits her husband for letting her “take the lead” in terms of when they got married (2018) and when children would enter the picture. “He was like, ‘It's your body. Yes, it's a together decision, but eventually it's your body that's going to go through it. So whenever you feel ready.’”

While there wasn’t a significant weight on dates and years, there’s most definitely a shift, now, in time: life pre-Dua and post-Dua. Padukone can’t put her finger on if and how she’s changed since becoming a mom, but said "my center has shifted." Singh agrees, "There is a new center piece of her universe and that’s our baby girl Dua."

“This is the best version of Deepika I have ever known,” he shares in an email. “As it is often said, ‘the way you do one thing is the way you do everything.’ That holds true in the case of Deepika as a mother. She is completely present. Absolutely immersed. Extremely attentive, sensitive, caring, and beautifully gentle.”

She and Singh are in lockstep in parenting and wanting to, “be there for [Dua’s] every need,” demanding schedules be damned. They know parenting in the public eye can come with a lot of criticism, but she has experience on living on a public stage and learned early on to tune out the noise.

“Whether it's what movies I want to do…how I want to live my life or the things that I'm really passionate about, and beyond that, it doesn't even matter what anyone else thinks,” she says. “I am someone who has always been able to tune out and just listen to my instinct.”

Some of those instincts come from her own upbringing and close-knit family. Born in Copenhagen, and raised in Bangalore, she and her sister spent their childhood floating around, following her father, Prakash Padukone’s, schedule as a professional badminton player. (He continues to mentor for the Indian Olympic team.)

She wants to give Dua the same kind of childhood she experienced, one “free from any expectation.” (“We weren't burdened with our parents' hopes and dreams,” she adds.) She even has some blueprint of what Dua might experience growing up in the spotlight being the daughter of a notable athlete.

“I don't ever remember my father sitting me down and saying, ‘Hey, I'm a professional badminton player and I'm a celebrity.’ I remember it being he was a father first and everything that we got to know of him was based on just our own curiosity and the fact that everything was just so normal. It was in fact only much later on in our lives where we found out that our father was a celebrity—when people approached him for autographs.”

That sense of normalcy and innocence is something she wants to protect for Dua, shielding her from paparazzi and keeping Dua’s face hidden from her Instagram followers (nearly 128 million if you include Singh’s following). Even during this interview, she takes a moment with each answer to make sure she’s not revealing anything too intimate about her daughter that tabloids can latch onto. At one point, she realizes she may have exposed too much (“I don't know how much of this Ranveer is going to be okay with me saying,” she says with a nervous chuckle).

Something Singh is okay revealing? Padukone is a pro at curating Instagram Reels and sending them to him daily for parenting tips and tricks. “I must say all of them are extremely insightful and helpful,” he notes. “Everything in Deepika’s life now revolves around Dua. Everything else comes secondary, sometimes even her own health.”

Speaking of her health, it’s often a topic of conversation—publicly and privately.

In 2014, she shared on a national stage that she was struggling with anxiety and depression and that she was seeing a psychiatrist and taking medication. It was completely unprecedented territory for an Indian actress at the time and in doing so, almost overnight, shifted the narrative around mental health in South Asia and through the diaspora. (The following year, she launched the Live Love Laugh Foundation to provide access to mental health resources in India.)

So she was aware that pregnancy and postpartnum hormones could have a real effect on her mental health. It didn’t dissuade her from pursuing motherhood, but it was something she knew she’d have to actively monitor.

“I've been okay so far,” she says. “Everyone around me has been really kind and nice enough to sort of check on me...I've been very lucky to also have that support system that's more than happy and willing to step in whenever I need it.”

Because of a more than decade-long struggle with her mental health (and, of course, being an actress) she’s had to develop wellness go-tos that keep her feeling herself. Drinking three liters of water a day (she keeps a daily count of her water intake, even forcing her team to meticulously keep track of exactly how many glasses and when they were consumed. If she hasn’t reached her self-prescribed quota before bedtime, she will sit with a “tray full of glasses” to reach her minimum.)

She also believes in movement as medicine. Even in her final, very uncomfortable trimester (“Suddenly you're discovering body parts because they hurt. But that rib pain was, oh my God.”) she was doing yoga. Post-delivery, she eased into swimming, then Pilates, then functional training. Now she’s able to add cardio and weight training. She’s just now, slowly, starting to feel in tune with her body again; to find her strength, her stamina, her core.

But don’t get it wrong—this is not a conversation about aesthetics. Padukone isn’t interested in entertaining discourse about post-baby bounce back; it’s another aspect of the noise she’s tuned out. In fact, it was the rockier journey she went through with pregnancy that gave her the perspective to do just that.

“I was very sure that once the delivery happened, and that was successful, that I was going to just be in the moment, just love my body, love my baby, and just replenish my tank…thanking my body, respecting my body.”

She continues, “I think I'm aware about up to what point I can push my body and mind, and then when I feel like, Okay, I need that time for myself, or whether it's that one hour where I need to go to the gym, just because that's my time, or I'm feeling really exhausted, I need a quick power nap, I do that.”

It’s fitting we circle back to napping and sleeping, considering we’re still here, sitting on her bed. Sleep has always been one of her priorities (“It's a number one health tool or hack that I think is so underrated.”) and before having a baby, she admits she tracked her hours and quality of sleep. Now she’s settled for 10 minutes of “mindfully focusing on [her] body” here and there.

Even when she can’t catch some shut eye, she’s okay adjusting, enjoying living in the moment.

“You've always wanted something. And there it is in your hands…Every couple of days she'll be sleeping and Ranveer and I will look at her and then just look at each other and be like, we can't believe this has happened to us.” Sounds like a dream.

Photographer Rid Burman | Stylist Shaleena Nathani | Hair Stylist Gabriel Georgiou | Makeup Artist Anil Chinnappa | DP Gorkey Patwal | Production Imran Khatri Productions; Radhika Chemburkar | Set Designer Purnima Nath