‘Drishyam’ actress Shriya Saran has always preferred remaining tight-lipped about her private life. The actress who is also a well-known figure in the South has hardly spoken about her Russian boyfriend Andrei Koscheev who she married in a hush-hush ceremony in 2018.
However, Shriya recently opened her heart out and spoke about her love life. In a recent interview with TOI, Shriya shared how Andrei swept her off her feet with his love.
“God has been kind and I’m blessed to have such a supportive partner like Andrei. I somehow like the word partner more than a husband. Because Andrei is like my partner-in-crime, partner-in-fun and everything else. He’s really proud of me and my work. Whenever I’m stressed or worried about what I’m doing, he always tries to calm me down. He’s the best thing that’s happened to me and I am loving every minute that I spend with him.”
Speaking about why she avoided answering questions about Andrei, she said, “I felt like there were too many negative comments going around. People would say stuff like, ‘why are you marrying a white boy?’, ‘couldn’t you find someone here?’, etc. But when you fall in love, you fall for the person he is and not where he comes from or what he does. And that’s what happened to me.”
“Yes, I’ve always been quiet about my personal life and I’ve never really spoken about what I was doing apart from work. That’s because I’m a very private person outside of work.”
“Of course, I’m a happy-go-lucky person, I have a lot of friends and I love people. But we all have a right to personal life.”
She added that they are now slowly talking about each other publicly. “It’s just so happened that I wanted to post a picture and in all the pictures, he was there. So I told myself, ‘Let us start with one’.”
“We both were very nervous about it. Because if you’re on social media, you will get 90 bad comments and maybe 10 good ones.”
“I told myself, ‘concentrate on the positive and don’t bother about the negative’. After a while, I reached a stage, where I could tell myself, ‘don’t concentrate on anything. You like a picture, just go ahead and post it’. In my case luckily, 99 per cent of the comments were good and only two-three were bad. So I thought to myself, maybe it’s not so bad after all.”
Sharing where the couple first met, the ‘Paisa Vasool’ actor said, “We first met while I had gone diving in Maldives. He didn’t even know who I was when we first met. It was only later that he found out I’m an actress. A few months after we met, he asked me, ‘do you have a movie online’, and I said, ‘Yes I do’. So then, he went ahead and watched it. That was really sweet.”
She went on to speak of a time when Andrei really surprised her. “I had shot for a song with Mahesh Babu there for Arjun (2004). Obviously, he didn’t know about this, or so I thought. When I reached St. Petersburg, he picked me up in his car and he took me to all the places where I shot and he kept asking me, ‘do you remember?’ and I’m like, ‘no, I don’t remember anything’. And then he started laughing and said, ‘you shot at all these places’. I was stunned and asked him how he knew this, and he replied, ‘because I saw it’. That was the cutest thing he had done.”
Opening about her ‘best Valentine’s Day’, Shriya revealed, “I don’t know what we’re doing this year, but I think my best Valentine’s Day was last year when he took me to watch ‘The Nutcracker’. It was one of those very old theatres and we just walked in and it was stunningly beautiful. The show was spectacular and we had a great time.”
On the professional front, Shriya will be seen in a guest appearance in SS Rajamouli’s next ‘RRR’ starring Jr NTR, Ram Charan, Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgn.