Dia Mirza On Losing Her Father At 9 & Growing Up Too Fast | The Namrata Zakaria Show

n this episode of The Namrata Zakaria Show, I sit down with Dia Mirza — actor, producer, eco investor, and United Nations Environment Programme Goodwill Ambassador — for one of the most wide-ranging and politically candid conversations I've had on this show. Dia talks about losing her biological father at nine, becoming a working model at sixteen, winning Miss Asia Pacific as a teenager, and then battling an industry that reduced her to a beauty queen and branded her bad luck when her early films didn't perform. She's disarmingly honest about calling Rajkumar Hirani and begging for work before Sanju gave her career a second life. We get into her powerful segment in Made in Heaven and how she convinced Zoya Akhtar to rewrite the ending, why she's an unapologetic advocate for the uniform civil code, the IC 814 controversy, her upcoming projects with Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Sunny Deol, what it was like delivering her son Avyaan in his sixth month, her relationship with stepdaughter Samaira, and why she refuses to own a Birkin. Dia is rare — an actor who is genuinely political, genuinely sustainable, and genuinely unafraid to say so on the record. 00:00 Introduction 06:04 Losing her father at nine 12:46 Struggling for work after failures 19:14 Women in Indian cinema and patriarchy 25:19 Made in Heaven and rewriting endings 31:22 OTT platforms democratizing storytelling 37:09 Upcoming films and working with Nawaz 43:20 Activism informing her craft as actor 49:17 Climate crisis and urban waste management 55:15 Sustainable wedding and wearing a sari 1:01:08 Fashion philosophy and rejecting fast fashion 1:07:42 Stepdaughter Samaira and blended family life 1:14:12 One India Stories production house