Media365
4 min readMumbaiOct 13, 2026 11:16 AM IST
Sobhita Dhulipala claimed back in 2016 that she’d never date an actor. She attributed her resolve to her belief that the “vanity is too much” when an actor is dating another. However, as life turned out, she began dating Telugu star Naga Chaitanya in 2022, and tied the knot with him in 2024. She’s now explained the change in her stance over the years.
Never dating an actor to marrying one
“I think I was stereotyping it at that time maybe because of the examples I saw around me. That was probably me being narrow,” confessed Sobhita. However, she also added that she doesn’t mind re-evaluating and changing her opinions for the sake of personal growth. “I’m more scared of people who don’t change their opinions. I’m okay with having different opinions at different points of time. I’m okay with myself adapting,” she said.
She also addressed the heightened scrutiny around her personal life ever since she began dating Chaitanya less than a year after his divorce with fellow actor Samantha Ruth Prabhu. “Society is like weather. It comes and goes. If you overidentify the weather, you’re going to be lost once the weather changes. So, I think it’s important to be centered and keep my eyes open to what the reality is. I think I’ve been fortunate to know that. Being centered is a choice you make,” the actor told The Hollywood Reporter India.
Three years ago, before Sobhita had even publicly acknowledged her relationship with Chaitanya, she admitted she was open to dating an actor. “I think my judgments have come down a little bit. Being judgmental is not necessarily a bad thing. I feel like it’s only when we judge, can we assess. If we are constantly judgmental for the sake of analysing, that’s not right. But I think, being judgmental in measure is very natural. I may have had a certain amount of conditioning which I am, over the years, pulling down,” she told Film Companion in 2023.
Sobhita on balancing life and career
Sobhita starred in tentpoles like Sashi Kiran Tikka’s Telugu-Hindi action film Major and Mani Ratnam’s Tamil period epic Ponniyin Selvan when rumours of her dating Chaitanya began to pick up steam. She also starred in Dev Patel’s Hollywood directorial debut Monkey Man in 2024, before her father-in-law and veteran actor Nagarjuna announced her engagement with his son.
Sobhita headlined Vandana Kataria’s Hindi film Love, Sitara, which dropped on ZEE5, a couple of months before her wedding with Chaitanya. Her first release after tying the knot was Sharan Koppisetty’s Telugu crime thriller Cheekatilo on Prime Video India earlier this year. Now, she’s finally gearing up for her first Indian theatrical release in three years — Pa Ranjith’s Tamil sci-fi sports action film Vettuvam, slated to release this December.
“I had signed it way before (the wedding),” Sobhita revealed in the recent interview. “To be honest, there was so much happening. Looking back, I can attach meaning to it. Relationships are always ever-evolving, right? How I feel on day 1 vs how I feel 10 years in. So, no opinion there, really. Just figuring it,” she added.
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Sobhita also argued that contrary to popular perception, she doesn’t really look at love as just one kind of love. “At the cost of sounding a little self-absorbed maybe, I don’t think love is a relationship. It’s a state of mind. It’s like a vibration. I don’t think of romantic love when I think of love. I’m always feeling love. It probably sounds abstract,” she said.
