‘I thought she was Lara Dutta’: Akshai Varde recalls mistaking Sameera Reddy at their first meeting

Sameera Reddy and her husband Akshai Varde got married in 2014. They have two kids and often share family photos on social media. The couple lives a quiet life in Goa, away from Bollywood's busy world and cameras. Sameera quit acting in films and is now a social media creator whose videos cover cooking, motherhood, body positivity and mental health. Akshai runs his custom bike shop. Lately, they talked about how they met and fell in love.Akshai showed up at the ‘Tezz’ film promotions certain he'd meet Lara Dutta. “Someone told me there’s this actress, Sameera Reddy. In my head, I was picturing Lara Dutta,” he admitted. Sameera, recounting the moment to Hauterfly, said she first noticed him on a massive bike brought for the shoot. “There was this big bike that came in for the shoot, and Akshai was on it,” she recalled. While he kept his eyes on safeguarding the borrowed ride, she felt an instant spark. “I was like, wow, he’s really hot. I started behaving like a teenage girl trying to impress him,” she said. Once the shoot wrapped, Akshai held back from asking for Sameera's number, figuring a Bollywood star was beyond his reach, so she took the lead and made sure he had it. “I wasn’t going to ask for her number. I’m like, Bollywood actress, no way. I’m not getting into this, you know. Then she comes up and says, oh, you know what, this bike’s really fancy. And I have a lot of friends in Bollywood. And she dropped some names and all. They would all be interested in bikes like this. So, you should get my number. So I took out my phone and I said, okay, give me your number. So, promptly she has given me her number. Yeah, but that was how we met.” “That’s how it started,” Akshai said. “We went on a date, and the story began.”Sameera Reddy and Akshai Varde got married on January 21, 2014. The couple has two kids, a son named Hans, born in 2015, and a daughter named Nyra, born in 2019.