Imagine giving India its biggest film ever…
and then not being able to sleep for the next three years.
That's the confession Prabhas just made.
In a new behind-the-scenes documentary, Baahubali The Torchbearer, the actor pulled back the curtain on what life actually looked like after Baahubali exploded.
Spoiler: it wasn't glamorous. It was terrifying.
"I couldn't sleep properly for two or three years after Baahubali," he said.
"The level of responsibility in every department suddenly increased a thousandfold."
Think about that for a second.
Baahubali 2 became the first Indian film to cross ₹1,000 crore worldwide.
It didn't just break records. It rewrote the rulebook for Telugu cinema overnight.
And the man at the center of it all… just wanted to know one thing.
What on earth do I do next?
Before Baahubali, Prabhas's films ran on budgets of ₹20–40 crore.
After Baahubali, every choice carried the weight of a franchise that had become national mythology.
The team spun in circles:
Everything was on the table. Nothing felt safe.
When Saaho opened, the North India first-day number was ₹26 crore.
For a Telugu-origin star, that was unheard of.
Prabhas was blunt about why:
"It happened only because of Baahubali. There's nothing else to it."
The ship sequence in Radhe Shyam. The scale of Salaar. The vision of Kalki.
None of it would have been financeable without the mothership that came first.
Those sleepless years eventually birthed two giants:
"We had the mother, the great Baahubali, which made it possible for us to make Kalki and Salaar," Prabhas said.
We romanticize "overnight success" like it's a finish line.
But here's a star at the absolute peak — admitting that the view from the top came with three years of staring at the ceiling.
Success didn't free him.
It handed him a thousand times more responsibility, and dared him to live up to it.
He did. But the receipts are written in lost sleep.
That's all for now!
