Actress Samantha Ruth Prabhu revealed that her 2022 diagnosis of myositis made her feel like she had lost her identity and felt completely helpless.
When Samantha announced her condition last year, she revealed that she had halted all of her acting projects to begin the recovery process. In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter India, Samantha opened up about how the autoimmune disease changed her perspective on strength and confidence .
“I always thought confidence came from the way you carry yourself, the way you work out, your routines, and the way you dress up,” Samantha said. “And myositis just took that away from me.”
“Confidence is something that’s carefully built,” she continued. “But when something like this happens to you, sickness really doesn’t care how confident you look. I felt such an identity crisis when that happened to me. I felt like I had no control over anything that was happening to me.”
She added: “It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I do have control over how I react to it. I don’t have to pretend like I’m confident. But there are other lessons that I need to learn along the way.”
However, Samantha believes she learned valuable lessons from her time spent in recovery.
“I realized that resilience, faith, hope, these are qualities that sickness taught me,” Samantha said. “And as soon as I understood that and accepted that, everything became better. As much as I want to say I don’t wish to go through this, it taught me something that has become such an invaluable quality of my life. I went through the whole ‘why me?’ phase. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that there’s something I can learn from this.”
After her diagnosis, Samantha said she even considered retiring from acting. She explained that when she stepped away from filming for about a year to recover, she took up many side hustles and described herself as “a serial entrepreneur.”
“I spent my year’s break learning about things I truly believed in and invested in so many many businesses,” Samantha told the outlet. “I became a serial entrepreneur.”
She even told The Hollywood Reporter that she was “good” with the idea of no longer acting, but her husband and filmmaker Raj Nidimoru convinced her to keep working.
“I was about to give up. I actually sent out a mail to my Citadel team, telling them I can’t do this movie,” Samantha said. “And they were the ones who didn’t give up on me.”
Samantha married Raj Nidimoru in December. She wed the filmmaker at the Isha Yoga Centre in Coimbatore. In June 2026, the couple announced that they are pregnant with their first child together, with Samantha expected to deliver in December. The actress is currently on maternity leave after filming for her latest movie Maa Inti Bangaram was wrapped up.