Actress Priyanka Chopra has starred in countless movies and shows ever since she won the Miss World crown in 2000. However, the first Bollywood director she met after winning the pageant told her to get surgery while she was still a teenager at the time. Her then-manager agreed with the director, and she found herself in a terrible position.
The 38-year old actress revealed the shocking moment in her new autobiography. As per a report in ABP News, she wrote, “After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him.”
She continued, “I did. He stared at me long and hard, assessing me, and then suggested that I get a b**b job, fix my jaw, and add a little more cushioning to my b*tt. If I wanted to be an actress, he said, I’d need to have my proportions ‘fixed’, and he knew a great doctor in LA he could send me to. My then-manager voiced his agreement with the assessment.”
“I left the director/producer’s office feeling stunned and small. Was he right that I couldn’t be successful unless I had so many body parts “fixed”? I thought of how individuals in the media and others in the industry had referred to me as “dusky” and “different-looking,” and I wondered if I was cut out for this business after all,” she said.
Thankfully, she soon parted ways with her then-manager, and didn’t pay heed to their remarks.
She added, “It’s so normalized that it doesn’t come up in conversation. I talked about a movie that I walked out of because of how I was spoken to by the director,’ she said. ‘It was early in my career, but I never told him why I walked out.”
She explained how she was encouraged to keep quiet about the situation, “I never had the courage to stand up for myself, and actually admit it. Because I heard so often, ‘Don’t be a nuisance, you’re new in the industry, you don’t want to have a reputation that you cause trouble or you’re not easy to work with’.”
“Now on the other side of 35. I know that’s a normalized thing that girls hear so often. “I fell for it too, even though I consider myself a forward-thinking, smart girl. I learned from that over time, but at that time, I was terrified,” she admits.
“Yes, I faced that then, I faced that like everybody else when you’re in patriarchal industries, which ours has been for a very long time,” she concluded.
She also talked about women taking their careers into their own hands and doing things their own way, Metro News reports. About this special time in the industry, she said, “I’ve mentioned a bunch of female producers in the book that I really admire, who’ve taken charge of their own lives and said, “Alright, you’re not going to make a part for me or the movie that I want to be in, I’m going to produce it myself.”
“We see so many women that have banded together to be able to do it ourselves and [are] taking back our power. Now we’re seeing, we are that generation that is hopefully going to see women in leadership roles, that is going to see women in roles of power so that the next generation that comes after us doesn’t have to inherit these issues,” she continued.
“That’s our job. We need to take that seriously and we can only do that ourselves by being an example of what a possibility could be. ‘If I had seen somebody else on TV, kicking ass… The show I did, Quantico, I was the first South Asian to ever [front] a network TV show, in 2015. It was crazy to think about that. To me, if I had had that, maybe I wouldn’t have been so insecure in the hallways of my high school or felt that I was so different.”
On what she would’ve told her younger self, she stated, “That I’m proud of you. I would say that there’s always going to be times in my life, just like everyone else’s life, where we do have to put a brave face.”
“Life surprises you, life has the ability to surprise you when you think you’re so prepared. ‘And I think it’s really important to be brave, it’s important to have your principles and your values in check. It’s very important to have integrity and what you stand for,” she proclaimed.
“I would definitely tell my younger self that I’m proud of her for having navigated some really tumultuous waters and come out on the other side to be able to tell the story,” she concluded.
More power to you, Priyanka!
Cover Image Source- Left