Shweta's love confession - ‘I CAN'T BELIEVE I DID IT!'

The Head High actress took a leaf of faith when she left her old life in India

- Annemarie Quill

What do you do when you’re asked to lead a cheerleading squad and you have no idea how to go about it? When you’re the straight-talking Priya Patel in Kiwi rugby drama Head High, you fake it till you make it!

“She doesn’t muck around or back down,” laughs actress Shweta Tomar, who plays the school principal’s wife-turned-clueless-cheerleading-coach in the show, currently screening on Three. “I love that about her.”

Fans this season have enjoyed Priya’s fish-out-of-water storyline and behind the scenes nobody knows that feeling better than Shweta.

The mum-of-two, 37, threw caution to the wind in 2012 when she left India to make a new life in New Zealand for love.

Shweta and her husband Shourjo, who works in technology, first met as teenagers when they were studying at the same university in Bangalore.

“He asked me out and I wasn’t ready for commitment, but I did kind of like him,” she laughs.

After college, they ended up in different cities and things might have stopped there, but fate had other plans. In 2005, Shourjo “suddenly showed up and surprised me on his 20th birthday”.

The pair became an item and were together for four years before Shweta bowed to family pressures and married someone else.