Sobhita Dhulipala

Sobhita Dhulipala (born 31 May 1992) is an Indian actress and former beauty pageant titleholder. After representing India at Miss Earth 2013, she made her film debut in Anurag Kashyap’s Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016) and became widely known as Tara in the Amazon Prime Video series Made in Heaven. Her work spans Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam and Tamil cinema, including the Telugu films Goodachari (2018) and Major (2022), and the American action thriller Monkey Man (2024).

Early life

Dhulipala was born in Tenali, Andhra Pradesh, and grew up in Visakhapatnam. Her father, Venugopala Rao, was a Merchant Navy engineer, and her mother, Santha Kamakshi, was a primary school teacher. At sixteen she moved to Mumbai on her own, and she later studied corporate law at H.R. College of Commerce and Economics. She is trained in the classical dance forms Kuchipudi and Bharatanatyam.

Pageants

A college friend who was interning with the Miss India organisation encouraged her to audition, and she entered, by her own account, mostly to prove to her friends that she could clear the first round. She was named Femina Miss India Earth 2013, a runner-up title, and represented India at Miss Earth 2013 in the Philippines. She did not reach the top 20, but won several sub-titles, including Miss Photogenic and Miss Talent.

Film debut

Her first film was Raman Raghav 2.0 (2016), opposite Vicky Kaushal, for which critics at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes nominated her for best supporting performance. She signed a three-film deal with Phantom Films the same year, and later appeared in Kaalakaandi and Chef, both with Saif Ali Khan. Her first Telugu film was Goodachari (2018), a commercial success in which she co-starred with Adivi Sesh as a psychology graduate.

Made in Heaven and wider recognition

In 2019 she played Tara, a wedding planner, in Made in Heaven; The Hindu described her layered portrayal as a standout. The same year she played an intelligence operative in the Netflix spy series Bard of Blood, made her Malayalam debut in Geetu Mohandas’s Moothon alongside Nivin Pauly, and appeared in the Hindi film The Body.

She was part of the Malayalam hit Kurup (2021), and in the Hindi-Telugu biographical film Major (2022) played a guest trapped in a hotel. She then played Vaanathi in Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan: I and Ponniyin Selvan: II, and starred with Anil Kapoor and Aditya Roy Kapur in The Night Manager, which won her the ITA Award for Best Actress – Popular (OTT). She returned as Tara in the second season of Made in Heaven.

Hollywood and a Telugu return

In 2024 she played Sita in Monkey Man, the directorial debut of Dev Patel, who also starred in it. She had auditioned for the part before her first film, and Patel later told her he had known she was right for it from that audition.

In 2026 she returned to Telugu cinema with Cheekatilo, released on Amazon Prime Video, playing Sandhya, a journalist with a podcast who follows a series of murders in the city. One reviewer praised her grounded performance and her Telugu dialogue delivery.

Personal life

Dhulipala began dating the actor Naga Chaitanya in 2022. They were engaged in Hyderabad on 8 August 2024 and married on 4 December 2024 at Annapurna Studios.

Sources: Wikipedia and Wikidata.