Priyanka Chopra said she ended up quitting a film early in her career after a director said that he needed to see her in her underwear.
The 40-year-old Indian actress said the comment from the director, who she worked with when she was just starting out in a Bollywood film around “2002 or ’03,” became a “dehumanizing moment” for her, The Zoe Report reported.
“I’m undercover, I’m seducing the guy — obviously that’s what girls do when they’re undercover,” Chopra said about the scene in the film. “But I’m seducing the guy and you have to take off one piece of clothing [at a time].”
Priyanka Chopra reveals film director demanded to see her underwear, causing her to quit https://t.co/5gtFXbvSKX
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“I wanted to layer up,” she added. “The filmmaker was like, ‘No, I need to see her underwear. Otherwise why is anybody coming to watch this movie?'”
“He didn’t say it to me,” Chopra continued. “He said it to the stylist in front of me. It was such a dehumanizing moment. It was a feeling of, ‘I’m nothing else outside of how I can be used, my art is not important, what I contribute is not important.'”
The “Baywatch” star admitted she stayed on the set for two more days and then ended up walking off the project. “I just couldn’t look at him every day.”
Years later, Chopra said she wanted to transition from Bollywood to Hollywood and was at first met with some pushback.
“People didn’t want to take meetings with me because they thought I was a Bollywood actor and I couldn’t do mainstream American movies,” Chopra said.
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“I had been on the cover of this [fashion] magazine six times in India and they wouldn’t take a meeting with me in America,” she added. “Because they were like, ‘Oh, I don’t know what we’ll do with her.'”
“I was 17 years old when I started doing this. I’ve been picked apart — my actions, decisions have been scrutinized,” Chopra continued. “I’ve learned how to protect myself by building barriers and walls. [But] now that I’ve done this for long enough, the lines are blurring for me. The public person and the real person are kind of becoming the same.”
The actress tied the knot with Nick Jonas in 2018 and the two recently welcomed their daughter Malti via a surrogate.