Amid Samantha Akkineni divorce rumours, Naga Chaitanya says it's ‘painful’ to see his name being used to promote gossip

Naga Chaitanya, amid rumours of marital discord with Samantha Akkineni, has said that he finds it ‘painful’ when his name is used for gossip purposes.

Actor Naga Chaitanya spoke about how he shuts out the rumours about his personal life while making public appearances and promoting his films at a time when interest in his relationship with wife Samantha Akkineni is dominating the discourse. It has been rumoured in recent weeks that the couple's marriage has hit a rough patch.

Naga Chaitanya and Samantha Akkineni are dealing with rumours of a split.

In an interview, Chaitanya was asked how he manages to remain focussed on work, even at a time like this. He said that he has followed the practice of separating the personal from the professional from an early stage in his career.

He told Film Companion South, “I think from a very early time in my career, I sort of kept my personal life personal and my professional life professional. I never mixed the both. I've always had this habit that I learned from my parents as I was growing up, I always noticed once they came home, they never spoke about work. And when they went to work, their personal life was never diluting into work. It was a very nice balance that they maintained, which I always observed.”

Asked if the minute-by-minute coverage of his life is ‘hurtful or harmful’, Chaitanya said, “Initially, yes, it was a little painful. I was like ‘why is entertainment heading this way?’ But after that, what I've learned is that in today's age, news replaces news. Today there's one news, tomorrow there's another news, today's news is forgotten. But in my grandfather's time, there were magazines, and magazines used to come once in a month. And that news sustained till you got the next piece of news. But today you're getting the next piece of news the next second or the next minute. It doesn't stay in people's minds for too long. The actual news, the news that matters, will stay. But the superficial news, the news that is used to create TRPs, is forgotten. Once I made this observation, it stopped affecting me.

Chaitanya is promoting his new film, Love Story, co-starring Sai Pallavi. Rumours of his divorce started doing the rounds when Samantha dropped ‘Akkineni’ from her social media accounts and adopted a simple ‘S’. Recently, she told off a journalist for questioning her about the rumours while she was at a temple.