Nayanthara is one of the highest-paid female actors in India today, having traversed the Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, and Hindi film industries. However, she had a fairly modest upbringing, having no connection to the film industry. In fact, her father was a part of the Indian Air Force, which implied her family lived out of a suitcase.

Nayanthara’s childhood across India

Nayanthara revealed on a recent podcast that she was a very “underconfident girl” when she was in the 10th standard in her native state of Kerala. “Since my father worked in the air force, we kept travelling. I did my schooling mostly in Delhi and Gujarat. My friends mostly spoke in Hindi. I had a mixed group of friends. We never had the problem of ‘she’s from here, she’s from there.’ They were all very inclusive,” recalled the actor.

But that changed once her father retired from the air force. Nayanthara’s family subsequently moved back to their home state of Kerala, where the actor confessed she felt more out of place, ironically. “When I moved to a school in Kerala, I could see more of Dubai or Abu Dhabi returns there. The way they were brought up in life was so different from us,” she said on The Pearle Maaney Show.

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The exposure and upbringing Nayanthara had as an air force kid was starkly different from her batchmates in the Kerala school, where they grew up in a more homogeneous and comfortable environment. “So, I felt very left out. I felt very sad. They were a group, and we were left out. Not completely out, but I got that left-out feeling,” said the actor.

She admitted to feeling that relocating to her native state of Kerala was, in fact, a “mistake”. She wanted to continue studying in Kendriya Vidyalaya in Delhi and Gujarat. “The teachers, the warmth, and the students there were terribly missed. Since I was very underconfident then (in Kerala), it was one of my lowest phases then. I was figuring out what to do, and I felt I wasn’t good at anything. I was good, but not great at studies,” she added.

Nayanthara wished she could go back to her 15-year-old self now, and assure her, “You’ve got this.” Little did she know that the girl born as Diana Mariam Kurian would go on to become Nayanthara, one of the highest-paid female actors of India today. Hauterrfly reports she received Rs 12 crore to Rs 18 crore as her fees for her next release, Geethu Mohandas’ Kannada action thriller Toxic: A Fairytale for Grownups, slated to release in cinemas this Wednesday on the occasion of Onam.

Nayanthara’s first pay

Contrast that to the first-ever pay cheque Nayanthara received back in the early 2000s as a young adult. She recalled on the show that her first-ever job was as a model for a fashion event organized by Vanitha magazine. While she couldn’t recall the exact figure she received as compensation, she confirmed that it was in the Rs 2,000 to Rs 3,000 range.

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Nayanthara was in college when she was doing modelling part-time. That’s when director Sathyan Anthikad spotted her in her modelling work and approached her to play the key role of Gowri in the 2003 hit Malayalam family drama Manassinakkare. In a 2005 interview with Rediff, she revealed that she while she wasn’t interested in pursuing a career in movies, she just signed that film as a one-off.

“I finally agreed to do just that one movie. The film became a big hit, and ran for more than 100 days,” she said. Nayanthara was then approached by filmmaker Fazil for a role opposite Mohanlal in the 2004 psychological horror film Vismayathumbathu. “When people appreciated my acting, I started enjoying films! Since nobody called me a bad actress, I thought I’d give the second film a try. Now, I am very much into this profession, and am enjoying every minute of it,” she added.