I had played many audacious characters before. There had been Sonia in Aitraaz, Meghna Mathur in Fashion, and Susanna in 7 Khoon Maaf. Nobody who had watched those films at the time complained about the behavior of those sexually active, blackmailing, murderous women; although some people may have been surprised that I’d taken on roles like that, I ended up winning awards for them. But that scene in the car in Episode 1 provoked a frenetic conversation on the Internet about how I had crossed a line and become too bold now that I was working in the U.S. I will admit that the criticism bothered me even as I thought it was ridiculous. The Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC, had clear mandates about acceptable levels of sexual explicitness and violence. Sexual activity, for instance, could be suggested to a degree, but not shown. I was a master of this, having worked in the Hindi film industry for so long, where you could show things but not show things. Disney felt the same way: the sounds of that sex scene in the car, for instance, were dubbed after the scene was filmed, and I was nowhere near my co-actor Jake McLaughlin when I recorded them. Ah, the magic of the movies.
The pressure of the work itself was intense. The first season, I was in almost every scene of every episode. We worked five or six days a week, fifteen or sixteen or eighteen hours a day. I’d usually be picked up at five in the morning and I sometimes wouldn’t finish until eleven at night. On most weekends I’d fly into New York from Montreal, where we filmed, to do interviews, photo shoots, and television appearances to promote the show. All this on top of figuring out a new environment with new norms.
When I’d started in the Hindi film industry, I’d had no idea what I was doing when I first walked onto a set, and so I’d had to learn everything on the job. Now I knew my craft, but I had to get reacquainted with the culture. I’d last lived in the U.S. in 1998 as a teenager. America and I had both evolved since then, and when we met again we were strangers. Getting to know each other took a little time, not only outside the studio but in it, as well.
Again, I watched and observed, questioned, and soaked up as much knowledge as I could. The first couple of months I heard repeatedly from directors suggestions like “Maybe not with the hands so much” and “Just throw it away this time” and “How about we try a little less?” It took me a while to understand that large gestures were my natural way of expression, having lived almost all of my life in India. The acting in Hindi films is bold and forthright and energetic, reflecting the generally animated gestures of so many Indians. No surprise, then, that when I came to Hollywood my animation had to be contained. Tremendously! Once I realized that I had to recalibrate my brain to play things smaller, it all got a lot easier. Now, after all these years, I can finally do both styles, large and small, switching back and forth automatically as needed.
I also had to re-attune my ear to American speech and speech patterns. While my American accent had worked well enough in the audition, I decided I needed a dialect coach on set to help me avoid the occasional slips that happened, especially when a scene was really emotional and I slipped into my Global Confused Accent. Sometimes I felt like I needed a translator as much as a dialect coach. When directors would say things like “Let’s not die on this hill” or “I don’t have a dog in this fight,” I didn’t want to look as clueless as I felt, so I just walked around wondering what they meant. It was almost the high school cafeteria all over again: Buffalo wings? Buffaloes don’t have wings.
Even film terminology sometimes perplexed me. On most films or television series around the world, at the end of each day of shooting, a schedule, known as a call sheet, is distributed to the cast and crew specifying what time each individual has to be on set or in hair and makeup the next day. In America and a few other countries, the first actor listed is the lead actor—“#1.” This is not a term I was used to hearing in India—leads were never ranked by number, we just knew who they were—so the first time I heard “Let’s get number one. Where’s number one?” I had no idea it was me being referred to. And I have to admit that for the first few weeks of shooting, after I figured that out, it gave me a little thrill every time I saw “#1 Priyanka Chopra” at the top of the call sheet.
All these years later I’m happy to say that now I’m fully trilingual: I speak Hindi, English, and American, all of them fluently.
* * *
EVERYTHING SEEMED TO have happened so fast. Just a few months earlier, I’d been reading a pile of scripts poolside at my L.A. hotel. Now I was the lead in my first television show ever, in my first acting job in this country. Along with the unrelenting shooting schedule and the on-the-job learning was the need to promote the show. In May, I learned about one more piece of the promotion puzzle.
Every spring the major television networks preview their upcoming fall and midseason series for advertisers, the press, and the other industry people in a weeklong event in New York known as the upfronts. I was a bundle of nerves when I arrived at the red carpet for ABC’s upfront presentation, but then I saw Kerry Washington and she waved me toward her, making me feel welcome and comfortable instantly. Later, in the greenroom with about seventy-five cast members from ABC’s other shows, Kerry and Ellen Pompeo from Grey’s Anatomy were both incredibly kind to me. As the lead actresses in their hugely successful respective network shows, maybe they saw how petrified I was and understood the rigor of my life that first year: ten months of shooting (most of which was yet to come), an endless succession of long days, and the weight of being “#1” on the call sheet. Having two of the biggest female stars in American television at that time sit me down, give me the 411, and take time for a pep talk helped ease my anxiety, and for that I’ll always be grateful. I felt like they entered my train compartment and calmed the course of my journey. They probably don’t even realize the importance of what they did for me, but I, for one, will never forget how they so generously took me under their wings that night.
ABC put a tremendous amount of support behind Quantico, especially when it came to marketing. My face was on buses, posters, and billboards across America. I remember gazing up at the huge billboard of my face on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and thinking, Holy shit! It had been so difficult to get any kind of media attention here, and now there was a building-sized image of me in handcuffs, gazing over my shoulder at all who passed by below on the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. It reminded me of a humid night in Mumbai in 2003 before my first movie came out. It was late, and Tamanna and I were sitting on Juhu Beach at a bend in the road where there were six billboards. I’d looked up at them and told her I wanted my face on all of them. At a moment some years later, that had actually happened and we’d celebrated together. And now, years after that and thousands of miles away on another continent, I was FaceTiming her about another billboard moment and we were celebrating again.
When the show launched on September 27, 2015, it worked. Quantico eventually aired in more than sixty countries in its first season to become a global success. The validation and relief were great, vindication from all the skeptics who just couldn’t resist their sniping—those on the Internet who suggested I’d bought my own billboards, for example, or who wondered why I’d “faked” an American accent. What made me the happiest was that I felt with Quantico I’d made major inroads in breaking the classic stereotype of Indian actors in Hollywood: I knew that it wasn’t very common for audiences to see actors of South Asian descent in mainstream leading roles or in roles much beyond the predictable sidekick, tech nerd, or exotic love interest. Mindy Kaling and Aziz Ansari, along with a few other actors of South Asian descent, had played extremely popular characters on network television. Then, going a step further, Mindy and Aziz had taken matters into their own hands by writing starring roles for themselves in their own über-successful shows. The Mindy Project and Master of None showed their leads as wonderfully flawed, human, relatable characters, opening up more room for actors of South Asian descent and other minority actors to be cast in a full range of roles that r
eflects our shared humanity.
When I was living in America during high school, years before Mindy and Aziz had their own shows, the only mainstream Indian character I saw on television was Apu on The Simpsons—who was played by Hank Azaria, a white American, I discovered years later when he was called out for it (and in turn announced that he has stopped providing the voice for the character). All the characters on The Simpsons are caricatures, so it’s not like Apu’s treatment as a stereotype singled out Indians or Indian Americans for poor treatment. But having people ask me on the regular why I didn’t talk or act like Apu didn’t do a lot for my sense of belonging. I became a huge fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer because the protagonist, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, was a powerful teenage girl who battled evil forces. She was an awesome teenage role model, but I wonder now if my fifteen-year-old self walking the halls of Newton North would have felt a little less awkward in the world, a little more of a sense of belonging, if I had seen someone who looked like me playing the lead in a TV show or a movie. With Quantico, I hoped that young girls of South Asian descent and anyone else who felt underrepresented would be able to look up and recognize themselves and feel seen, and I’m proud and gratified to be a part of this shifting narrative.
* * *
I ALWAYS KNEW that my career would never be just one thing—not just films, not just music, not just television—and that I would follow a multitude of paths to make sure that all of my creative interests and endeavors would be fed. That meant straddling two careers in two continents. During Quantico’s first hiatus—the break between seasons—I added American film work to the mix, shooting Baywatch in 2016. Even before the hiatus began, I was finishing up Bajirao Mastani, in which I played an eighteenth-century Marathi queen. So on some weekends I would fly to India to shoot for one day, then come back and shoot Quantico. Translation: I flew out of Montreal to Dubai on Friday night, continued on to Mumbai, and took a helicopter to reach Wai, which is about 140 miles southeast of Mumbai, by Sunday morning. I’d film all day Sunday and leave as the sun was setting on that gorgeous, temple-filled riverside city, reversing my flight path. By Monday afternoon I was back in Montreal, ready to start shooting the next episode of Quantico. Airplanes became like flying bedrooms to me, and I swear I got to know some of the immigration personnel at the Montreal airport by name.
“What’s up, Émile? How’re you doing this afternoon?”
“Hey, you’re back! Worked all weekend again, eh, Priyanka?”
That schedule was probably the hardest one I’ve ever maintained and my body took a beating for it, but traveling back and forth like that was the only way to have it all, and I wanted to have it all.
I’d been working crazy hours for six or seven days a week for my entire film career in India, so honestly, it didn’t seem all that strange to me to be putting in this kind of time. There’s not really a concept of “weekend” in India the same way there is in America. The school week is five and a half days, for instance, as it is for some businesses, too. Film schedules are made based on location, not week, so you may shoot for ten consecutive days in one location and then have five days off. When I got to the States, it was culture shock for me to be required to take two consecutive days off simply because everyone else did.
Quantico had a five-day shooting schedule that theoretically allowed for weekend breaks, but the show was so ambitious, with so many shots scheduled per day, that we often went over into a sixth day. Hence the extra-long workweek. When that happened, I couldn’t understand why people grumbled about having to work on a weekend, especially since the union made sure we were fairly compensated for it. At that point in my life, a two-day weekend break seemed like a forced holiday to me. Not anymore! Show the thirsty camel some water….Now I take weekends off in India, too.
Having had the success of playing a character who wasn’t defined by her ethnicity in Quantico and later Baywatch, more recently I’ve ventured into playing characters who were written specifically as Indian or Indian American, like the character of Pinky Madam in The White Tiger, the adaptation of the 2008 Man Booker Prize–winning novel by Aravind Adiga. I read the book more than ten years ago, and its unblinking gaze at the harshness of the lives of India’s impoverished affected me tremendously. When I heard that a movie was in the works, I called my agents immediately and said I wanted to be a part of it. I was so keen to be involved—both because of the book’s impact on me and because I was eager to work with the award-winning director, Ramin Bahrani—that the size of the role didn’t matter. I made my agents call the producers multiple times. I met with Ramin multiple times, too, because this story of my homeland is such an important one to me that I was determined to be a part of it. I lobbied to executive-produce it as well as to appear in it, and I’m grateful that Netflix and Lava Media agreed, so I get to play that role, too. As of this writing, The White Tiger is in postproduction and I hope audiences will soon see it roar to life.
In the same way that I pursued involvement with that movie, I decided that I wanted to collaborate with actors and writers of South Asian descent here in America to create more and more opportunities for myself and others like me. Mindy Kaling is one of those writer/actors whom I deeply admire. When she wanted to explore being a leading lady, she didn’t wait for someone to invite her to the party; she wrote her own damn show, which then ran successfully for five years. She and I are now working on a buddy comedy for Universal Pictures that mines the humor in the differences between Indians raised in America and Indians from India. Plenty of room for humor there, trust me.
With films like this and The White Tiger, and my first-look deal with Amazon, there are a lot more projects in development. I’m creating more and more of my own opportunities, going after projects that I believe in and people I want to work with. I’ve been inspired in my efforts by many actors who, like Mindy and Aziz Ansari, have taken matters into their own hands, especially female actors like Kerry Washington, Eva Longoria, Anushka Sharma, Salma Hayek, Reese Witherspoon, Deepika Padukone, Nicole Kidman, Queen Latifah, and so many others who are now producing projects for themselves and in the process of opening up opportunities for others. I find their examples powerfully inspiring. Although I’ve been bold in many of my career choices, only now, after twenty years in this business, do I feel I have the courage and the credibility to move confidently in the direction of originating my own projects. And I’ve got to say, it feels good.
* * *
FORGING MY OWN way hasn’t always felt so good, though. At some point after Quantico took off, at a nascent stage in my American career, I seemed to have become a social media sensation—in a very good way and a very bad way. For example, in 2017 when I was promoting Baywatch in Berlin, India’s prime minister Shri Narendra Modi was also in Berlin, to meet with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The prime minister and I happened to be staying in the same hotel, and I contacted his office to request an audience with him. We got permission, and Sid, Dana, and I sat with him for a few minutes. We took pictures together, which we then posted online. Because I was promoting Baywatch that day, I was in a dress, not a sari. It was knee-length, high-necked, and long-sleeved. When we posted the photos to social media, there was a furor around the fact that I was meeting with the prime minister with my legs exposed. On top of that, people commented that because my legs were crossed in some of the photos, my posture seemed arrogant and therefore inappropriate for a meeting with a head of state. It was one of the first times I became global news, and I swear that was not the way I wanted to make global news. I was angry and confused. My response to the anger was to take a picture of my mom and me out at dinner that night in our short skirts and with our legs crossed, and to post it online with the caption “It runs in the family.” But all joking aside, I felt that I had presented myself respectfully. I had worn skirts and dresses all my life in India, at school and elsewhere, and I didn’t understand why it was now considered so unacceptab
le. The whole uproar baffled and saddened me.
The year before, in 2016, I’d made the Maxim India “Hot 100” cover. The photo of me on the front of the magazine had one of my arms above my head with my armpit exposed—which gave rise to a massive controversy because Maxim India was accused of photoshopping my armpit! Specifically, smoothing and whitening it. My armpit actually trended on social media with various hashtags, including #ArmpitGate. I was at Paris Fashion Week while this was all happening, and my team and I were mortified, appalled, and hysterically laughing all at the same time because we couldn’t get over how ridiculous and surreal it was to have my armpit go viral. Did this mean I’d finally made it? To commemorate the moment, I took a quick pic of my pits and posted it with the hashtag #WillTheRealArmpitPleaseStandUp.
Unfortunately, the controversies I’ve experienced haven’t always been laughable. During the third season of Quantico, an episode aired that was about Hindu extremist terrorists trying to blow up Manhattan with the twist of blaming the attack on Pakistan. There was a huge outcry about it in India, attacking ABC for what people felt was an offensive plotline, and attacking me for agreeing to be in it. I got worldwide backlash for being part of a plotline that involved Hindus as terrorists, but I wasn’t a writer or a producer, and I didn’t have any control or input into the storyline. Not to mention the fact that we’d had villains of every ethnicity trying to blow up New York over the course of the show. The uproar lasted for a very long time. There were online threats warning me not to return to India, and effigies were being burned outside my home there. When I did go back, local police needed to provide security for me. It became so out of control that ABC had to apologize and make a statement: “ABC Studios and the executive producers of Quantico would like to extend an apology to our audience who were offended by the most recent episode, ‘The Blood of Romeo’…The episode has stirred a lot of emotion, much of which is unfairly aimed at Priyanka Chopra, who didn’t create the show, nor does she write or direct it. She has no involvement in the casting of the show, or the storylines depicted in the series….Quantico is a work of fiction. The show has featured antagonists of many different ethnicities and backgrounds, but in this case we inadvertently and regrettably stepped into a complex political issue. It was certainly not our intention to offend anyone.” For a while I refused to comment or explain. Eventually, though, I too made a short statement on Twitter to try to calm the storm: “I’m extremely saddened and sorry that some sentiments have been hurt by a recent episode of Quantico. That was not and would never be my intention. I sincerely apologize. I’m a proud Indian and that will never change.” The moment I made the statement, another wave of condemnation came flooding in, this one led by people who called my apology a form of pandering. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The whole situation was deeply disturbing.
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