Besides sharing a native tongue and a career in film, Sobhita Dhulipala and Naga Chaitanya Akkineni had little in common. He lived in Hyderabad; she was based out of Mumbai. He grew up in Chennai; she was raised in Visakhapatnam. And perhaps most telling of all—he followed her on Instagram, but she didn’t follow him back. “I found out during an Ask Me Anything,” she recalls, referring to Instagram’s question-box feature. “I was sifting through the questions when I saw one that asked, ‘Why aren’t you following Chay Akkineni?’ I was like, ‘What?’ So I went to his profile and saw that he was following only around 70 people, including me. I was a tiny bit flattered, so I followed him back.” Akkineni’s updates began appearing on her feed, and his sushi posts—he co-owns a pan-Asian cloud kitchen called Shoyu—caught her attention. One message led to another, and then another, until finally, in April 2022, Akkineni booked a flight to Mumbai to whisk Dhulipala off for a lunch date.
When I join the Zoom call for our interview, I expect to see the newlyweds together, scooching even closer to make sure they both appear on screen. No such luck. We’re twenty minutes behind schedule when Akkineni’s face lights up the screen, followed by Dhulipala, in a separate window, a few moments later. A flurry of gracious apologies ensues before Akkineni explains that he’s at home in Hyderabad, while Dhulipala is in Chennai, busy filming martial arts sequences for her next yet-to-be-titled film. So busy that she hasn’t even had dinner yet.
Since marrying in December 2024, the couple have been joined at the hip—honeymooning in Mexico, visiting temples in Srisailam (Andhra Pradesh), and easing into married life, except when work calls. Between their packed schedules, even making time for this interview was a minor miracle. “It’s all very new,” Dhulipala says, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear, adding, “we’re still getting used to navigating the logistics.” Akkineni, who had his hands full this past year with the release of the Telugu blockbuster Thandel (2025), his pan-Asian food venture and his motor-racing team, The Hyderabad Blackbirds, nods in agreement. “We’ve chalked out the next four or five months based on her commitments and mine, but we’re always looking for little pockets of time to squeeze in a holiday or chill together.”
For someone who has spent more time in Mumbai than in her hometown of Visakhapatnam, Dhulipala—the daughter of a sailor father and a teacher mother—hardly envisioned this life: relocating to Hyderabad to marry an actor. A few years ago, she was certain she wanted neither a life outside Mumbai nor a husband from within the industry. “We build up all these walls, but ultimately, when you feel seen, moved and beheld, you just want to lean into the feeling,” reflects the former pageant queen, who dipped her toes into modelling before segueing into acting. It helped that Akkineni held a mirror to her sensibilities. “He was clear-headed, even-keeled and optimistic. At that point, I was also at a place in my head where I could see that I was ready to give and to receive. The timing was just perfect.” At the time, they neither publicly confirmed nor denied the relationship, carefully gauging sentiment—perhaps the public’s, perhaps their own. “I wanted to really sit with my feelings before going around town tom-tomming it,” Dhulipala adds.
Somewhere, a doorbell rings. Dhulipala disappears. When she returns, there’s a plate of biryani in her hands. “Go on,” I gesture animatedly, encouraging her to dig in while we chat. “Oh, she hates being disturbed. She wants to enjoy her food in peace,” Akkineni chimes in with a chuckle. Eating meals alone, Dhulipala tells me, is an art she mastered while living solo in Mumbai, so much so that having family around the table after marriage was a rare novelty. “Eating with company is such a privilege and a luxury, but for the longest time, I was completely at home wherever I went, completely at home by and with myself,” she explains, seated on her hotel bed, arms crossed over her legs.
Akkineni’s isn’t just any family—arguably, it’s the first family of Tollywood. His father is the prominent actor and film producer Akkineni Nagarjuna Rao and his mother, interior designer Laxmi Daggubati, is the daughter of late film producer D Ramanaidu. Inevitably, Akkineni grew up in the public eye. “It’s something I love about him,” Dhulipala says. By ‘something,’ she means his simplicity. “Before I knew him, I didn’t think he’d be so grounded. He’s perfectly content spending two hours cleaning his bike simply because he loves it. If he really likes something—or someone—he finds joy in being completely devoted to it. He’s also someone who genuinely believes in the beauty of life. No matter the inconvenience, the discomfort or the disappointment life may throw at him, he’s always looking on the bright side.” She points to the contrast between his two latest releases. Thandel was a massive hit, while Custody (2023) didn’t perform well. “But his reaction to each, two days in, was exactly the same.”
In the days leading up to this interaction, I have watched and rewatched numerous interviews they’ve given, but today, Dhulipala, in particular, is the exact antithesis of her internet persona. She isn’t, as she is often projected online, high-brow or stoic or inscrutable, or for that matter, as strait-laced as her on-screen characters. She is nothing like her brooding alter ego, Sita, in her Hollywood debut Monkey Man (2024), as deep and tumultuous as her character Kaveri in her sunburst of scene-stealers in The Night Manager (2023), or as badass as Tara in Made in Heaven (2019). Instead, she’s fun, gregarious and eloquent, dressed in a loose black tee, her face aglow sans makeup. Though she’s had a full day of work and no dinner in her belly, she rolls with the punches with her biryani by her bedside. How come? She smiles, tossing her luxurious mane to one side. “I’m more comfortable in myself today,” she says half-joking. “But truthfully, I think it has more to do with the characters I’ve played. Many embodied grief or some shade of grey. I think people see me through the lens of those characters.” She also chalks it up to a spot of social awkwardness. “Sometimes, it just feels easier and safer to stay reserved.” Akkineni puts it simply: “Many times in pictures I ask her, why aren’t you smiling? Smile. And she’s like, ‘In my mind, I’m smiling. But the outside world doesn’t see it.’”
What’s also imperceptible to the outside world is Dhulipala’s effortless ability to adapt. “In Mumbai, she’s the quintessential city girl—cool, hip, forward-thinking—but back home in Vizag, she’s deeply rooted in her culture,” Akkineni says. Still, he believes she’s more than the sum of her parts. “Her Telugu, man,” he lilts when asked what he admires about her, admitting it took a moment to register the first time he heard her speak the language. “My family speaks Telugu too, but I studied in Chennai, picked up Tamil outside and spoke English at home—so my Telugu is nowhere near hers. I keep joking that she should teach me, pass on all that intelligence,” he chuckles.
For Dhulipala, this linguistic bond is deeply intimate. “In Mumbai, I got so used to speaking other languages that I’d forgotten what it felt like to speak Telugu with someone beyond my parents and relatives. Talking to him in a language I associate with home was special.” They converse exclusively in Telugu—switching to English only when the conversation outpaces Akkineni’s vocabulary. “Then she’ll switch back and it just melts me,” he laughs, patting his own head in mock self-reproach. Dhulipala summarises it succinctly: “When I’m really happy or sad, it’s Telugu in my head. I think in Telugu.” I beam when they both tell me they’ve never actually told each other these things before. “We need to speak to you more often,” Akkineni jests. I make a note in my calendar.
To be clear, it wasn’t as if the stars aligned the moment they knew they were meant to be, though neither can pinpoint when that moment was. “There was no mic drop,” Dhulipala shares. “It just happened very organically.” When it was time for the next step, they kept it simple. He met her parents, she met his mum, then his dad, and once everyone had given their blessing, he got down on one knee, sans any fanfare, and asked for her hand in marriage. “Well, more of a crouch,” Dhulipala deadpans.
They made love look effortless when they married in Hyderabad, Telugu-style, around Christmas last year—she in an array of dazzling silk saris and bejewelled armlets, he in numerous pearlescent pancha (traditional Andhra dhotis), all of Dhulipala’s own design. “When I look back 40 years from now, I want to be able to smile at the way I draped my sari or know why I picked a certain piece of jewellery,” says Dhulipala, who admits to being most comfortable in traditional wear. In fact, the dress code for her last birthday, celebrated in Amsterdam, was ‘strictly sari’, Akkineni tells me later. “And if you didn’t follow it, you had to pay up.”
Funnily enough, this digital cover, aside from their wedding pictures, is among their most intimate moments on social media. “I’m a very private person,” Akkineni grins, while Dhulipala admits her interest in Instagram has waned since she tried—and failed—to cultivate a book-loving audience. But does it really matter? Instagram has already given them a life partner in one another. And that is everything.
Photographed by Nishanth Radhakrishnan
Styled by: Daniel Franklin, Agency: Uniq Management
Hair: Daksh Nidhi (Sobhita), Agency: The Artists Project; Raghuvir Gaonkar (Chaitanya)
Makeup: Eshwar Log (Sobhita); Flavia Giuliodori (Chaitanya), Agency: The Artists Project
Bookings editor: Aliza Fatma
Entertainment director: Megha Mehta
Sr. entertainment editor (Consultant): Rebecca Gonsalves
Production: Imran Khatri Productions
Assisted by: Ajay Singh (photography); Nida Shaikh, Amer Shaikh (styling); Aashima Chopra (bookings); Radhika Chemburkar (production)
Location courtesy: Venu Farms
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Sobhita Dhulipala: “The things that excite me don’t have much to do with money”
Sobhita Dhulipala's engagement sari by Manish Malhotra is made from Uppada silk
