Priyanka Chopra: ‘I’m not arrogant, I’m self-assured’

BDC News

She originally wanted to be an engineer, but winning Miss World put Priyanka Chopra on the path to Bollywood super stardom. Now she’s wowing America in a new smash hit TV drama. Sarfraz Manzoor meets a woman on a mission

It was January 2000 and in a car by Mumbai’s Juhu beach 17-year-old Priyanka Chopra was hanging out with friends. She had recently been crowned Miss India and was starting to consider a career in Bollywood. Through the windshield she could see six billboards advertising the latest Indian film. She told her friends she only wanted to be a star if she could be on all six hoardings. A few years later, when Chopra was a successful Bollywood star, she received a picture message from a friend: her face was plastered on all six billboards.
Priyanka Chopra is many things – beautiful, intelligent, down to earth and quick witted – but as that story reveals, one characteristic she does not lack is confidence. “I am a little – I won’t say arrogant – self-assured,” she says when we meet on a freezing Sunday in Montreal. Her time is so precious her publicists suggest we talk while she has her hair and make-up done. I’m worried Chopra will find it hard to focus on the conversation, but this is a woman who thrives on multitasking: she can act, sing and dance. “I’m a triple threat,” she laughs. Chopra laughs a lot after saying things you suspect are uttered with complete conviction.
In her native India, Chopra is huge – she’s appeared in more than 50 films and won 24 film awards including the Indian equivalent of an Oscar. She lives in an exclusive and affluent suburb of Mumbai popular with celebrities. Rumours about who she is dating fill gossip columns. But while her celebrity had been confined to those who follow Indian films, with the success of her new TV series her fame has gone global. Quantico, produced by the ABC network but filmed in Canada, is about a team of FBI cadets whose training class has been infiltrated by a terrorist. Chopra plays the lead – making the 33-year-old the first Indian to do so in a mainstream US drama. “I’m not even Indian-American, I’m Indian-Indian,” she says. “Everybody expected me to have henna and a nose pin and talk in an accent like Apu from The Simpsons. I was nervous because I wasn’t sure if America was ready for a lead that looked like me.”
 

The series was praised by critics and attracted such healthy ratings that the first season was extended, then a second was commissioned. “People think I had this big plan to break America, but I never did,” Chopra says, as the make-up artist dabs cream under her eyes. “I have never had a plan when it comes to my career: America came to me with an opportunity.”

She may claim her international success is due to good fortune and fate, but it becomes clear that is not the full story. The opportunity to star in Quantico came after Chopra signed with an American record label to record music and found herself working with Pharrell and Will.i.am on singles then hanging out with Bruce Springsteen and Bono in LA (she celebrated her 30th birthday in the U2 singer’s home). At a dinner party in 2014 Chopra got talking to Keli Lee, vice president of casting at ABC, who was working with Sofia Vergara and Eva Longoria and wanted to bring more diversity to television. Chopra was shooting films in India, so Lee flew to Mumbai and spent the day on set with her before offering a holding deal with ABC – meaning that Chopra could read for all the upcoming pilots the network was developing.
What did she see in you, I ask her. “That’s a question for her.” But there are lots of other Indian actresses… “Not like me,” she says. Her smile is flirtatious, but suggests a hard-headed awareness of her talents. Chopra told Lee she was interested, with one condition: “I wanted to be cast as an actor on merit as being the best person for the job. I didn’t want to be a stereotype of what an Indian girl should be. I wanted to be what I personify in my Indian movies: independent, sexy, good at my job and really smart.”
Chopra alighted on Alex Parrish in Quantico – a part not intended for someone of Indian heritage, but rewritten to refer to Chopra’s background. If you likedHomeland then Quantico will appeal: it begins with investigators searching through the wreckage after a terror attack and finding FBI agent Alex Parrish, who is subsequently suspected of being a terrorist and tries to clear her name.

Chopra has experienced what it is like to face racial abuse after one of her songs was used as the theme for Thursday Night Football on American TV. “My song replaced one from Faith Hill, who is like the all-American girl,” says Chopra, “and suddenly there was this brown girl and the NFL got so many emails from fans saying: ‘Who is this Arab terrorist?’ I got so much of it, too.” She laughs it off: “I find it really funny that people have such primitive thinking.” She decided to speak openly about it during interviews. “I called them out. I said: ‘Why is every Arab person a terrorist, and why am I an Arab terrorist just because I am brown?’”
This weekend she will be presenting an award at the Oscars. But on the debate about lack of diversity among the nominations, she won’t join the likes of Jada Pinkett Smith in boycotting the awards. “I am too new in this industry to be taking extreme decisions like that. When it comes to India I am very vocal about how I feel, but I am just six months old here, and honestly I want to go and see what will happen at the Oscars, especially as there is such a huge debate. I think it will be a very interesting evening.”
But while she may be new to Hollywood, Chopra is not new to the US. She was born in India to parents who were military doctors. “Every few years we moved to different locations,” she recalls. When she was 12 she went to Iowa – at her own wish. She was curious about how her American cousins were schooled, and her parents agreed to let her study with her extended family. But she was the target of racist comments. “I was the only Indian kid in my school in Iowa. Later I lived in Queens, New York and Newton, Massachusetts, and in high school I was bullied really badly.” Children would call her “brownie” and “curry” and tell her to go back to her own country. “It was supremely scary,” she says. “I would avoid going to the cafeteria and eat in the bathroom instead.”
The bullying forced her to return to India. She was now 16, and where before she had been, in her words, a skinny, gawky teenager, Chopra had now “grown in pretty much the right places”. She now found lovestruck boys following her back from school. “My dad was terrified and he literally turned our house into a jail,” she says. “He put wrought-iron bars on my windows – because one guy had jumped from another terrace on to my balcony – and a big lock on the front door. I wasn’t allowed to wear tight clothes or tight T-shirts. We had a big clash of egos.” While her father was terrified of his daughter’s blossoming beauty Chopra’s mother secretly entered her for the Miss India contest. She won – and, later, the 2000 Miss World contest held at the Millennium Dome in London.

“I remember having lunch in Spain and I had to have an opinion on the economy of Uganda! At 18! It was all a bit bonkers,” she says. What made it even more bizarre was that until her mother entered her for the beauty contest Chopra had been imagining a very different career. “I was supposed to be an engineer, so I felt like destiny’s other favourite child,” she laughs. “Besides Beyoncé.”
Destiny and fate come up a lot in our conversation. They hint at her two sides – one which feels her success is a happy accident, the other which is calculating and determined. She has, she says, always been driven. “After I won Miss India I realised I do not like failing. I just like being the best. I hate being a loser. So I just have to keep winning,” she smiles.

After Miss World, Chopra was in increasing demand for brand endorsements. One product she regrets endorsing was a skin-lightening cream. “I got swayed into doing it,” she says, “but then I realised it made me feel like I did as a kid – I used to try all those products until I became Miss India.” Did she wish she had lighter skin? She nods. “It really works on your psyche, man. We don’t realise it, but it does. I was the darkest, so in jest my family called me kaali [black girl], and I never really understood how much that affected me until I was a teenager.”
Chopra considers herself a feminist; you wonder whether she feels any contradiction, owing her career to a contest that judges women on their looks. “I don’t think so at all,” she replies. “I am exercising my feminist right to be in that beauty pageant. Men are going to objectify women. But feminism is just saying: give me the independence and the ability to make my own choices.”
These days Chopra often shoots for 16 hours a day during the week in Montreal and flies back to Mumbai to shoot a film for a day at the weekend. “I am in a state of permanent exhaustion,” she says. Does she get lonely? “I’m always around people!’” she says, pointing at the publicists and assistants in the room. “I want to be lonely. I want to be left alone for, like, two hours, for fuck’s sake!”