Sameera Reddy opened up about the beauty standards in Bollywood and how she tried hard to fit in. She said that she was constantly told how she was ‘too dark’ or ‘too tall’ and did not fit into the mould of the ‘girl next door’.

In an interview with Bollywood Bubble, Sameera said, “I was told I was too dark, too tall, too broad. I didn’t fit into that girl next door look. I had to constantly try and fit in it and it really exhausted and tired me. I don’t regret it because that was my learning to learn to come to this point of loving myself unconditionally. You have to go through a point where you actually hate yourself because when you come to this point of hating yourself so much and break into pieces, you can put yourself back together in the most beautiful way possible.”

As an actor, Sameera was expected to look a certain way. “It was not discrimination. More than that it was more of you have to look a certain way, whether you have to pad your chest or hips. There was always something that I had to fix,” she said.

Sameera, who made her big screen debut in 2002 with Maine Dil Tujhko Diya, was last seen in the Kannada film Varadhanayaka (2013). During her second pregnancy, she had started a campaign #ImperfectlyPerfect, in which she addressed body image issues and advocated self-love. She also opened up about experiencing postpartum depression and putting on a lot of weight after her first pregnancy.

“My campaign comes from the fact that I felt completely disillusioned and broken after being pregnant the first time when I gained weight and was 105 kgs. The perfect body and the perfect face that I worked on, for my film career, broke apart and I was completely lost,” she had told Hindustan Times in an interview last year, adding that it was important to accept and love oneself.