Deepika Padukone is a new mom to daughter Dua, whom she shares with husband Ranveer Singh—and by all accounts, motherhood suits the Bollywood actress.

The husband in question tells Marie Claire as part of a cover story for our new Motherhood Issue that Padukone's "center has shifted" since becoming a mom.

"This is the best version of Deepika I have ever known," Singh says 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."

Singh also shares that his wife sends him a daily roundup of Instagram Reels full of parenting tips—and he loves it.

"I must say all of them are extremely insightful and helpful," he tells Marie Claire. "Everything in Deepika’s life now revolves around Dua. Everything else comes secondary, sometimes even her own health."

It's not surprising that the Om Shanti Om actress is "absolutely immersed" in motherhood, as Singh puts it: She had known she wanted to be a mother almost her entire life.

Her sister Anisha was born when Padukone was five years old, and her "maternal instincts kicked in" even then. "I think nurturing, protecting comes to me very naturally," the star says.

While she always wanted children, the actress wasn't in a rush, and she says Singh let her "take the lead" on when that next step happened for them following their 2018 marriage.

"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.'"

Padukone is one of Marie Claire's Power Moms for 2025, alongside the singer Kali Uchis and fellow actress Gabrielle Union, among others.

Deepika Padukone is one of Bollywood's biggest stars, and now she's also a mom.

Padukone, who shares a baby daughter named Dua with her husband Ranveer Singh, opens up to Marie Claire about balancing raising a child with the demands of her career as part of our Motherhood Issue.

"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," Padukone, named one of Marie Claire's 2025 class of Power Moms, reveals.

The Om Shanti Om actress is learning day by day what she wants her work life to look like now that she's a mother—whether she wants to work in the same way as before or just see how things "evolve."

But some people in her entourage aren't as happy as she is to go with the flow, it seems. For example, she recently told a director that she couldn't meet with him because she needed to be with her daughter, and his response was surprising, to say the least.

"He turned around and said, ‘Oh, looks like she's taking motherhood very seriously,'" Padukone told Marie Claire. "I don't know if that was a compliment or a jab. What does that mean, taking motherhood seriously? Yeah, of course I am!"

Padukone and Singh are aligned on what they want their parenting to look like, namely that they want to "be there for Dua’s every need." They don't care about any criticism that may come out of that.

"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," Padukone said. "I am someone who has always been able to tune out and just listen to my instinct."

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

In 2021, Deepika Padukone announced her plans to launch a lifestyle brand (name still under wraps) that will be “rooted in India.” While the concept will eventually extend into a wellness platform—reflecting Padukone’s passion for a holistic approach to health—the company will first launch with science-backed beauty and skincare products, available online worldwide, beginning this summer. Here, the actress and entrepreneur shares the journey that led her to founding the concept, the brands she feels inspired by, and why she believes India is on the precipice of a wellness revolution. 

My first experiences with beauty were seeing my parents get ready for an evening out. Being that 6-year-old kid who's hanging by the door and watching them put on their finest. I'd see my mother do her beautiful eye makeup and apply her lipstick. I'll never forget those visuals. Then, when I was older and in school in Bangalore, we’d have plays or “fancy dress” competitions and my mom would take that lipstick and put it on my cheeks—a couple of dots on either cheek and smudge it out to give me that flushed look. Those really are my fondest memories of beauty: having my mother dress me up. She’s my starting point and inspiration for everything I do in beauty and fashion.

My mother and grandmother taught me “less is more.” Somehow, I feel like they never had to spell it out for me, but just in the way that I saw them carry themselves and conduct themselves. It was always elegant.

I'm a girl, at the end of the day, who loves dressing up and who loves wearing makeup. I think I've embraced both sides of my personality; there's a side of me who always likes to keep everything understated and the other side of me is “neon fuchsia gown on the Cannes red carpet.” So translating that to my new beauty brand, the looks may be dramatic but when it comes to skincare, less is more.

India has so many different beauty rituals that are unique to the country; traditions that have been passed down through generations and generations of women. My most favorite: the champi. Your grandmother or your mother or some elder oils your hair and massages your scalp. Sometimes you leave it in overnight and wash it off the next day. Sometimes you leave it in for a couple of hours. You can actually feel your head cooling down; your eyes start cooling. It's the most incredible feeling and there’s so much nostalgia attached to it.

There are so many more Indian beauty tricks and tips I value—that Indian women can teach the world. Like when you're out in the sun for too long, apply the cream that forms on top of the [unhomogenized] milk to your face. It’s great for sun-damaged skin. Or scrub your skin with a chopped tomato—it works like an exfoliation scrub. Another of my favorites: mix milk with turmeric and make a thick paste out of it. Apply it to your face, then wait for it to dry and wash it off. It has healing properties, and it's known to even out skin tone and give you this beautiful inner glow.

A beauty product—not sure if you can call it that—that I'm really fond of is baby powder. That's one of my rituals every night, before sleeping. I have a shower, and then I put baby powder on my body. I feel incomplete without it. I've been doing it for many, many years, but I can't remember the moment I actually started doing it... Now that I think about it, I feel like I grew up watching my mother do it.

I think the beauty and wellness industry in India is entering our most exciting phase. We're not as mature, market-wise, as the West, and, therefore, I think the timing for something like this brand is so beautiful. But there's definitely still a lot of work to be done in terms of diversity and inclusion and challenging the status quo. India is such an old country and there are so many years of this sort of conditioning—for instance, the promotion of skin-lightening creams. Have we progressed? One-hundred percent. Have brands taken cognizance of how they contributed to the problem? Are influencers on social media more aware of what creates that toxic culture? Are celebrities more conscious? One-hundred percent. We've certainly come a long way, but we do have a long way to go, like any other country in the world. 

Right now, it seems like most people and brands, everywhere in the world, are embracing diversity because it's a trend. I can definitely say that I have been made to feel like a “brown person” in the industry. I think it boils down to casting—a lot of times people don't even realize how obvious it is in the way that auditions are done, or what is expected of you, or in the way that rules are written. But I think the world would be a much nicer place if people understood diversity for what it truly means.

My definition of beauty has evolved over the years. Now, I feel most beautiful when I'm the most centered. When I was younger, I was influenced by what I saw on television and read in the magazines. Ten years ago beauty for me was most certainly attributed to my physical self, because that's just the way you're conditioned as you're growing up. But in the last three years or four years, I've started to feel beauty is to be in a state of bliss. To feel that absolute oneness with your truest self. 

With this brand, I want to leave a little legacy of what my beliefs are: physically, mentally, and emotionally. I think there are obvious things that are to be expected if one is launching a beauty brand or a skincare brand. But what makes it special and what differentiates one brand from the other is really founder-led. Fenty, for example, is so true to who Rihanna is; or, The Honest Company to who Jessica Alba is. The celebrity brands that come from a place of authenticity are the ones I admire. I think the inauthentic ones will fall off the radar anyway because the consumer today is extremely sharp, and they know exactly what they want.

I wanted to build this brand to share my experiences with skincare and with beauty, but it’s not just limited to that. It’s also my philosophy in lifestyle as a whole: the way I look at physical fitness; the way I look at mental fitness; the way I look at routines, sleep, and nutrition. My approach to this brand is more holistic, it's not just specific to a lipstick or a moisturizer.

In today's fast-paced world, I think we take for granted discipline in our schedules or creating routines or rituals. Even if it's just a couple of minutes to yourself in the morning quietly before you get to your gadgets and devices. Things like hydration are really important to me. Exercise—yoga, pilates, swimming—is really important to me. Emotional fitness and doing therapy regularly is important to me. All of these things form very crucial pillars of my brand. If I’m able to influence lifestyle patterns and nudge people to move to a place where they are leading healthier lifestyles—where they come out feeling more in tune with themselves—I think it will truly define the success of this brand.

People have been nudging me to start a beauty or lifestyle brand for a while. Telling me, “You're not someone who just talks, you're someone who actually leads by example. This is actually the life that you follow." But I always felt like I wasn’t ready.

I didn't want to be dishonest to the process. It's kind of similar to my acting journey. I started doing movies—my first movie released in 2007, which means I started working on it around 2006—but I was being offered movies even before that, big ones from big production houses with big leading actors. But even at that young age, I had this clarity to listen to my gut and say, "You know what? I'm not ready for this." Sometimes you're not ready for something and that's okay. I feel like there's a right time and place for everything. 

When I finally embarked on this journey to start this brand over the past couple of years, it was coming from a very deep place of passion. And I’m in a more confident place now. I know people find this really hard to believe, I get told this all the time: "You're so beautiful. You're so successful. Why would you have confidence issues?" But confidence is so much more; it's so deep-rooted. The way people appear sometimes—whether it's on social media, or in the news, or in the way that they conduct themselves—it's very easy to pass it off as, "This person just has ‘it.’ " But if we look at everyone with a little more empathy, you realize everyone's going through something. Everyone's been through a journey and everyone's struggling with something. And everyone is trying really hard to find the confidence from somewhere—that thing that just keeps them going.

I'm inherently not a confident person. I need validation. It’s taken me a lot to even get to where I am today in terms of the way I conduct myself. It's taken a lot of work on myself. It's taken a lot of reflection; a lot of meditation. I think following some of these “rituals” or beauty and wellness routines help you look better and help you feel better. And that feeling better translates into confidence. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. But they're definitely interconnected.

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