Lara Dutta recalls nearly drowning on Andaaz sets: ‘I didn’t know how to swim, sank like a rock’

Lara Dutta has played glamorous, comic, and action-oriented roles across a career spanning more than two decades. But one of her most gripping stories has nothing to do with any character she has played. It is about the day a wave swallowed her whole on a film shoot, and the co-star who dived in after her.

Speaking to Asian Television Network Canada, Lara revisited one of the most terrifying experiences of her career, one that began with a rogue wave, ended in a hospital, and eventually pushed her to learn swimming at the age of 30 for the 2009 underwater action film Blue.

Lara Dutta, who won Miss Universe in 2000 before making her Bollywood debut in Andaaz (2003), recalled how a dance sequence shoot went dangerously wrong when a wave swept both her and co-star Akshay Kumar into the sea. The sequence, filmed during the Andaaz shoot, left her completely exposed to the ocean’s force with one critical problem: she did not know how to swim.

“I went underwater, wearing leather, didn’t know how to swim, sank like a rock,” she explained. What followed could have ended far worse. Akshay Kumar, himself in the water, grabbed hold of her and brought her back to the beach. Lara then went into hypothermic shock, the shoot was immediately stalled and she was rushed to the hospital.

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The incident left a deep mark on her. When Akshay Kumar later recommended her name to the producers of Blue, an underwater adventure film that would require extensive ocean sequences, Lara Dutta’s first instinct was to say no. She called Akshay and told him she could not take it on. His response, characteristically direct: learn swimming.

“At 30, he asked me to learn diving. I said mai hi pagal mili hu,” she said with a laugh, recounting her reaction to the suggestion. But she did it. Lara learned to swim at 30, overcame the phobia the Andaaz incident had left behind and signed on for Blue, directed by Anthony D’Souza and released in 2009. The film, one of Bollywood’s most ambitious underwater productions at the time, took the cast into open water conditions that tested everyone involved.

The risks did not stop at learning to swim. The Blue shoot brought its own set of dangers, including sequences filmed with actual sharks in the water. Akshay Kumar himself had a near-death experience during the climax shoot, hitting his head on a sunken ship 150 feet underwater and bleeding in the presence of sharks before making it back to the surface.

Blue, also starring Sanjay Dutt and Zayed Khan, may not have been a box-office success when it was released, but for Lara Dutta, it represented something far more personal: a fear confronted, a skill learned later than most, and a story she now clearly tells with as much amusement as relief.

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