Joy, I’ve learnt, is rarely the fireworks we’re promised. It slips in through the cracks instead: the soft exhale of a child drifting off to sleep, the quiet of a set after the last light is adjusted, the moment a woman stops asking for permission to be who she is. It is not spectacle as much as it is stamina, a tenderness that shows up when the day has scraped you thin.
It is this kind of joy I am thinking about on a blush-gold November afternoon at Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios. The building has seen everything—heartbreak and heroism, reinvention and ruin, comebacks and collapses. But as I push open the heavy metal door of Stage 2, the air seems to vibrate with something gentler. Not the manic, adrenaline-fuelled energy of a blockbuster set, but a softer hum.
Inside, 30 people are choreographing the kind of chaos that only looks effortless in the final frame. A stylist balances a tray of bubblegum bows like a Parisian patissier. A production assistant yells for safety pins, someone else for more blush. The lighting crew wrestles a massive diffuser that sways like an indecisive cloud. In the centre of it all, calmly seated in a pastel chair, serene amidst the storm, is Kiara Advani, in her first photoshoot since becoming a mother last July. But make no mistake, this is not an actor ‘coming back’ from maternity leave—her most recent film, War 2, was one of 2025’s most anticipated releases, and an ambitious bilingual film is slated for a March release. Advani’s work has continued, the momentum never fully broken. Her life, it seems, has widened, and her selfhood has expanded to make room for it.
A day later, the bows are zipped into garment bags, the lights at Stage 2 have cooled to a metallic sleep. Some where else in the city, a four-month-old baby has been fed, rocked and tucked into a cot. When Advani appears again, it is inside the small blue rectangle of a late-night Zoom window. The frame is intimate, unadorned: beige wallpaper, a simple white shirt. Perhaps it is this stripped-back palette that pulls the next words out of her. “Pink was my first language of joy. Pink ribbons, pink hairbands, pink flowers, pink dresses. It was everywhere when I was little,” she smiles, aware of how easily the colour is dismissed. “People think pink is fragile, but softness isn’t the opposite of strength. It’s one way of being strong.”
On set at Mehboob Studios, this softness manifests when she remembers to thank the light boys by name. When she checks whether a young assistant has eaten. When she asks if everyone can take a break at the same time. “I grew up around women who looked out for each other,” she tells me now. “My mum, my school friends, my teachers. I naturally gravitate to that energy.”
When she calls herself “a girl’s girl”, it’s not a slogan. It’s WhatsApp groups from school that still thrum with birthday messages. It’s cheering when female co-stars’ trailers drop. It’s wearing a young designer on the red carpet because she knows what visibility can do for a career. It’s unfettered dreams about her daughter’s future in a world that clamps down on women’s hopes. Her voice becomes soft when she says her child’s name out loud. “Saraayah,” she sighs, lingering on it, savouring it. “It means ‘princess of God’. She arrived with her own light. I felt it instantly.”
Motherhood has not dissolved Advani’s career or blurred her edges. It has thrown them into relief. Time itself has become elastic. “It’s more textured now,” the actor agrees. “When I’m with Saraayah, I’m really with her. When I bathe her, I notice everything—her eyelashes, her tiny fingers, her giggles. These micro-moments feel so precious.”
In between these micro moments, Advani works. It’s a rare privilege for a woman not to be so consumed by motherhood that everything around it blurs. Even rarer for a new mum to not feel like her career has to take a back seat so her husband can roar up the professional ladder at full throttle. In her 2021 novel Nightbitch, Rachel Yoder pertinently writes: “How many generations of women had delayed their greatness only to have time extinguish it completely? How many women had run out of time while the men didn’t know what to do with theirs? And what a mean trick to call such things holy or selfless. How evil to praise women for giving up each and every dream.” Advani is determined not to press pause on her dreams, alongside watching her daughter change from one day to the next. She takes calls in the window between feeds. She listens to narrations while the baby sleeps. “I’ve become very focused about how I use the gaps. Earlier, time could just leak away. Now, I feel responsible for it.”
It would explain why presence has replaced hyperproductivity as her measure of a good day. It’s a recalibration many women will recognise: the slow unhooking from the cult of ‘doing it all’ in favour of ‘doing what matters right now’. For the 34-year-old actor, it shows up in what she chooses to let go of: events that would once have felt obligatory, appearances that no longer feel worth the time she could be spending with her child.
As for her own childhood, Advani grew up in what now feels like another era of Mumbai: landline phones with spiralled cords, evenings playing chor-police in building compounds until someone shouted for the children to come home, music from cassette tapes rewound with pencils. “I want that realness for Saraayah,” she says. “I want her to feel grass under her feet, stain books with crayons, run outdoors till her cheeks turn pink.”
In that analogue childhood, there was also the glamour of borrowed fabric. Little Kiara raiding her mother’s cupboard, wrapping dupattas around herself like gowns and staging imaginary award shows in the living room. Now, she scrolls through her tagged photos on Instagram and finds little girls doing the same with her outfits: one of them used gold wrapping paper to recreate the custom Gaurav Gupta gown she wore to the Met Gala 2025. “Adorable,” she says, still a little startled at the idea of being someone else’s fantasy. “Although the joy of dressing up has changed,” she admits. “Now, I love dressing up Saraayah.” More than anything, she would love to see Saraayah move through the world with wonder instead of worry.
Advani is aware of the complicated relationship between mothers and daughters, how it can simultaneously be fulfilling and fraught. In her acclaimed memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy offers some insight into this push and pull: “Mrs Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became.” It’s too soon for the actor to be thinking about maternal ebbs and flows, but when the terrible teens come for her daughter, she hopes Saraayah will choose the very quality Advani’s family sees in her. “Softness,” she repeats. “It’s such an underrated superpower.”
Travel has powered Advani and Sidharth Malhotra’s love story—mountain air and airport lounges, sunburnt shoulders and shared hotel breakfasts, the anonymity of being two people in a city where no one knows their names. It’s one of their shared interests that is shaping their dreams for their daughter. Saraayah has already been to the Maasai Mara, a core memory that now lives in the safari-themed wallpaper in her room. “Travel makes history real,” Advani says. “I want Saraayah to see the world. To be a wanderer who still feels at home everywhere, especially within herself.”
On set, the actor emits major ‘front-bencher’ energy—the student who has done the reading, who wants to get it right. It doesn’t sit easily with the cliché of the pampered star. Nor does the familiar trope that motherhood slows ambition. Advani recalls being 18, telling her acting coach she wanted to be a working actor and a mother someday, and the coach laughing it off. “But look at me now,” she says, smiling. “I’ve never been more ambitious. Motherhood expands you. The fire within you becomes more focused.”
During her pregnancy, Advani filmed for seven months. Only her director and producer knew. Before emotional scenes, she would sneak into the narrow bathroom of her vanity van, place a hand on her stomach and whisper, “Mama is only acting, okay? This isn’t real.” It became a ritual—a bridge between the emotional intensity of her role and the inner calm she wanted for her baby.
Thanks to a reliable support system—her mother, her team, her husband, whom she calls “an incredibly hands-on father”—Advani finished filming a bilingual project, which was shot in English and Kannada and is set to release in March. Already, she is reading other scripts, including a biopic she’s excited about. “It’s not about the genre anymore,” she explains. “It’s about the soul of the story.” This newfound clarity and the ambition to chase it sit alongside a non-negotiable concern for mental health—hers and others’. “Burnout helps no one in any industry,” she says when we talk about the eight-hour shift debate. She repeats three words she tries to apply equally to her staff at home and crew at work: “Dignity. Balance. Respect.”
There are quick remedies for mental exhaustion. Sure-fire ways to reawaken a weary soul. For some, it’s reading. For others, it’s going down for a nap without setting an alarm. For Advani, it’s the “sound of Saraayah giggling in her sleep”. It’s in these small, ordinary miracles of motherhood that the actor’s perspective has shifted most, including her relationship with her body. She remembers training for that much-discussed War 2 bikini shot—“immense discipline”, she recalls—only for the film to release when she had just delivered and her body looked so different. “After delivery, a part of me thought, ‘I’ve done this before, I’ll do it again.’ Then I realised it’s not about having the best body.” Motherhood, she says, has taught her to honour and value her body. Losing a kilo here or there now feels irrelevant compared to creating a life. “When I look at my body, I think, ‘Wow, you created a human.’ Nothing compares. Now, whatever shape or size I am in, I will always respect my body. You have to respect what your body can do for you.”
After all, it’s the same body that shelters so many versions of her. A new mother. A hard-working actor. A soft warrior.
Photographed by Yung Hua Chen
Styled by Samar Rajput
Hair: Sonam Solanki/Feat Artists
Makeup: Sandhya Shekar
Manicure: Manali Panchal
Bookings editor: Aliza Fatma
Entertainment director: Megha Mehta
Senior entertainment editor (consultant): Rebecca Gonsalves
Production: Imran Khatri Productions
Assisted by: Anish Oommen, Ankit Raj (photography); Aditya Kamal Singh, Vedica Vora (styling); Sushiru (hair); Aparna Gunaranjan (bookings); Radhika Chemburkar (production)
This story appears in Vogue India’s January-February 2026 issue. Subscribe here.
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Kiara Advani and Sidharth Malhotra, and the truth of “keep it private until you know it’s permanent”
From Kiara Advani to Rihanna—13 times pregnant celebrities owned the red carpet
Kiara Advani and Sidharth Malhotra, and the truth of “keep it private until you know it’s permanent”
