It’s a time for double celebrations for Samantha Ruth Prabhu as she is currently cherishing successes in both her personal and professional lives. While on the work front she has had success with Maa Inti Bangaaram, on the personal front she is expecting her first kid with husband, filmmaker Raj Nidimoru. Excited about this phase, the actor says, “I am taking my maternity break on a professional high. It’s time to soak it all in in this little break and I will be back when I am back. I will focus on something big for my return.”
Reflecting on the success of Maa Inti Bangaaram as a female led commercial actioner, Samantha Ruth Prabhu says, “It was specifically designed to be mainstream. Raj, while he was designing the film, had the intention to flip the script. He took all the ingredients of a male action commercial entertainer and made it into a female lead film. This character Swarna was designed to be the ‘shero’ and that is what the audience is also lapping up. Women are coming to theatres because before this, they weren’t given enough reason to do so.”
Ask her if she has planned her maternity break or if she wants to wait and see how her body recuperates and her life with the baby, and the actor says, “I am not putting that pressure on myself, and like I’ve always said, I’m not running any race and I’m not pressed for time. I will see how it goes.”
With the film’s success and this new phase of life, Samantha is quite occupied but she is noting the change that is coming in her. “Now I’m a lot calmer since this movie’s release, as usually I’m a lot more frazzled. I haven’t had a theatrical release in three years. So for me, I don’t have that pressure anymore of time and delivering many films back-to-back. I know that it’s just important for me whenever I do have a film release in the theatres, I make it worthwhile,” she says.
Maa Inti Bangaaram also sees her husband Raj Nidimoru in the role of creator and stunt director, and Samatha is all praise for him bringing out the best in her. “Raj might be called the creator, but he plays all roles like producer, creator, director and every single role. So there was a lot of care in designing every aspect of this film and since he introduced me to the action genre (with The Family Man 2), now he knows my strengths and weaknesses well. He has been fine-tuning it and it is important that we up the game with every project that we do, otherwise it tends to become the same old and boring work,” she says, adding that the biggest challenge in this film was guns, action in saris and that “brought a new flavour to the action”.
She adds, “I was surprised because I assumed that the elderly women who watched the film would say they liked the family dynamics or the comedy. But when you see those women in saris saying ‘we loved the action’, it’s a special kind of feeling.”
While the film has garnered praise pan-India, Samantha insists that the film is a Telugu project and that is how it was intended to be. “The first step was to flip the narrative and have a female-led family entertainer and do it well. We were very clear that we didn’t want this film to be pan-Indian because it was specifically made for the Telugu audience. It is rich in Telugu nostalgia and history, so it was not right to force it on a pan-Indian audience. You shouldn’t be too greedy also. You should know who you are making the film for and be very pure about that intention. Just because it’s doing well, I don’t want to push it on an audience that it was not made for. But now that we have the confidence and we know that we have struck a chord, our next project will be a little more ambitious and will include something that can be taken pan-India,” she says.