Cinema VinesIndian actress Sana Saeed, who first captured audiences as the youthful Anjali in the 1998 hit Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and later as a student in Student of the Year (2012), has made a bold move to the United States. In 2021 she permanently relocated to Los Angeles after earlier visits, including a 2016 workshop at the New York Film Academy, and has since established her own production house, Beyond Magic Studios, with her husband Csaba Wagner.
When asked about starting over in a new country, Saeed said, “I first came to Los Angeles to study acting and filmmaking in 2016. When I went home, I couldn’t name it yet, but I knew I had to return. I was being called to it. I’d lived my whole life in India up to that point and I think my soul just wanted a new adventure. Leaving my friends and family was harder than I expected. I knew the move would affect my work and I’d made peace with that going in. Starting over somewhere nobody knows your history is humbling, but it also cleared space for me to decide who I actually wanted to be.” She added that her husband’s presence made the transition easier, noting, “My husband had already been living here for a while by the time I made the move. Our production company, Beyond Magic Studios, is new and it’s something we’ve built together and we’re genuinely excited about it. We’ve come to believe, in our own ways, that going after what you want and taking risks, is the only way we want to live. I’m married to my best friend and now I get to work with him on the very thing I’ve loved my whole life. Things really do have a way of working out.”
Beyond her career shift, Saeed has opened up publicly about her long‑standing battle with bulimia. She explained that growing up she had never heard the terms “bulimia” or “eating disorder,” and she treated the problem as a personal habit she had to solve alone. “I carried so much shame around it, thinking I was the only one dealing with this. For six years I had no name for what I was going through. I was desperate to get better and find a healthy way to eat and eventually I came across a book on recovery that gave me the language for what I was actually dealing with. That’s when the real healing began, and it took four years to recover completely,” she said. Saeed emphasized that earlier awareness could have accelerated her recovery and that sharing her story might help others feel less isolated.
She also reflected on the broader pressure to lose weight, noting that even in college she observed friends dieting, chasing “size zero” ideals, and cycling through countless diets. “Becoming aware of your changing body as a young woman is completely natural, but health, nutrition, and well‑being should guide us rather than the pursuit of an unrealistic thinness,” Saeed remarked. Her candidness about both her relocation and her health journey underscores her commitment to authenticity and to encouraging others to seek help and support.
