Priyanka Chopra Breaks Down Her Career, from 'Kaminey' to 'The Matrix Resurrections'

I was a kid when I started.

I've failed, I've said the wrong thing sometimes.

I've done the wrong thing sometimes,

and I've dusted myself off and stood up again

and try it again.

You know, it took me a long time to forgive myself

for making mistakes, having failures, being insecure.

I used to be really tough on myself

because this business is tough.

[gentle music]

Hi everyone, this is Priyanka Chopra Jonas,

and this is the timeline of my career.

[Announcer] Miss India.

[trumpets bellows] [audience applause]

I was taking these headshots for a scholarship program

for a school in Australia, and the photographer said,

You know, you're really pretty,

can I take some more pictures?

And my teenage vanity was like, Yeah, of course.

Sure.

So he took some portfolio pictures, like mug shots,

you know, soft focus with my hand like this,

like all of those pictures.

My brother had a brilliant idea that if I had to go

for a pageant in Mumbai, which was away from our small town,

he'd get his room back and he suggested that to my mum.

So I went for the preliminary round with my mum

at 17 years old, kind of, you know, walked up the ranks,

made it to the finals, went to Mumbai City,

took part in the Miss India pageant and won it.

And then I was sent for the Miss World pageant,

not knowing anything.

Suddenly I was, you know, thrown into this world

where people knew me.

And then I went for Miss World,

it was about 97 girls from different parts

of the world that year.

And we were there in London and being terrified

and competitive at the same time,

I kind of put my best foot forward and won that too

and it just changed the trajectory of my career.

I admired her from the bottom of my heart

for being so considerate, compassionate, kind.

Giving up her life for people in India.

[upbeat Indian music]

I first came across acting when I was in the States

in high school here.

I remember Fiddler on the Roof being one of the productions

in my high school.

I remember being mesmerized.

I was like, How does one do that?

I just did not know that that kind of grandiosity

could be achieved in a moment.

And whenever there's somebody who's won a beauty pageant,

especially prestigious pageant like Miss World,

Miss Universe, Miss India,

it just has been sort of a natural tendency for Bollywood

or the Hindi film industry to gravitate towards them.

You have producers knocking on your door

because you're the it thing

and that's what happened with me.

My parents were both physicians,

had no idea what to do with this attention.

So we had a Chopra family conversation like we always did.

And my dad asked me, What do you wanna do?

Do you want to try it?

And I said, What if I don't?

And he said, That's the thing.

I don't want you to have a 'what if' in your life.

What if five years later, you do what you're doing,

you go back to college and you always have this regret

in the back of your head of like,

'What if I did, what if I had tried it?'

So he said, give it a shot for a year, a year and a half.

If you're terrible, you'll still be 19,

you can go back to school.

[upbeat Indian music]

So the first few movies that I did was a Tamil movie

called Thamizhan and two Hindi movies, Andaaz and The Hero.

Both of them were tagged to be really big movies.

And I remember walking onto set not knowing anything

and thinking that acting was about the clothes that you wear

and the makeup and hand that you get done.

And then I walked onto a set and I had to think

about how to take these words that were on paper

and make them a person, and that was terrifying.

[upbeat Indian music]

I remember on Thamizhan,

which was really difficult for me

because I did not know Tamil as a language.

I was learning it phonetically,

memorizing it, understanding the meaning behind it,

and then saying my lines.

But I loved watching my co-actor Vijay,

he was one of the first few influences in my life.

He had tremendous humility on set.

Once he came on set, he wouldn't leave set.

And that's something I do even now.

I very rarely will go back to my trailer in between shots,

unless it's a really long time that I have to wait.

I'm usually hanging out on set.

I'd like to understand why we're taking different shots.

I like to speak to the crew.

I like to kind of be in the mix.

[upbeat Indian music]

We can think about culture whether it's in America

or in India, you know, it has changed.

I can't even imagine the clothes I used to wear that time.

But at that time,

big heroines that would always be

in the mainstream commercial movies

had to be a lot more coy, pure, good girls

versus my character in Aitraaz was a bad bitch.

At that time, it was a lot.

[romantic music]

This movie was made by a director duo called Abbas-Mustan

who are very well-known, very well-respected.

They were making a remake of Disclosure,

Demi Moore's Disclosure.

And because my character was a sexual predator

and I was 21 or 22 people were like,

Oh, if you play like such a sexually charged character,

I don't know if your audience will be able to see you

with that kind of purity and that dream girl,

a good girl, the girl you wanna take to your parents

basically versus the one you wanna take to your bed.

And that imagery at that time

was something people thought was important.

I was shocked with the kind of reception that I got

after the movie.

I'll never forget we were at the screening

and I was terrified because I was like,

I was sort of embarrassed too,

because my parents were watching it as well.

When the movie finished and people stood up

and they started clapping and they started looking at me.

And there were other people in the movie

who were massive stars,

but I walked out of the theater

and people were standing outside to congratulate me.

And it was such a crazy moment in my head

because I'd built it up in my head that, you know,

I was gonna be canceled after this movie

and no one's ever gonna work with me again,

but it changed my career.

And that movie really opened up my eyes

to wanting to delve into things that made me nervous,

made me scared.

I kind of figured out that I worked well under pressure

and it changed my choices after that.

[Indian music]

[speaks in foreign language]

I looked for a challenge.

I wanted each person, each woman that I play

to be her own person.

And Don was a really pivotal movie in my career

at that point.

It was a remake of a very popular Hindi movie

by the same name called Don in the 70s.

And to step into the shoes of Zeenat Aman

was terrifying in itself because she's an icon,

but I wanted to bring my own, you know, vibe to it.

And I remember speaking to my director, Farhan,

and he really wanted me to learn Tai Chi

and sort of have the body language of a fighter.

Someone who could, you know, who was confident,

and it was one of the first times

that I had started doing stunts

not knowing that I'll be doing them

for the rest of my life myself.

I just took to it.

I took to how learning something

would change my body language,

how learning a new skill would make me different

as a character.

And then that's something I would continue to do

for many, many films after that, whether it was languages,

dialects, you know, many different kinds of skillsets

that I would learn.

[speaks in foreign language]

Kaminey was made by one of my favorite filmmakers

in the world, his name is Vishal Bhardwaj

and it's a predominantly male movie.

I was probably one of the most pivotal female parts,

if not only in the movie.

And it had like nine scenes or something, that's it.

I was like, Vishal, this is such a small part.

I wanna do a full movie with you.

And he was like, Trust me, just trust me.

See what I do with you.

And I did, I had to learn a new language called Marathi,

which is the local language

of the state of Maharashtra in India.

And I played a very deep rooted Maharashtrian girl.

So I had to learn the language

and specifically the dialect from the place

that she came from but also have to strip myself

from the glamour that I had sort of collected

by doing movies like Don or Aitraaz,

and over time I was playing all of these

really interesting characters,

but very polished characters versus Sweety

was unraveled, loud, brash, held a machine gun

if she wanted to, use vile language and was feisty.

And I had so much fun.

[speaks in foreign language]

Kaminey again pivoted my career in a different direction

where I started taking on a lot more indie movies,

a lot more character driven parts,

and Sweety was one of the first few

where I started feeling comfortable without the hair,

the makeup, the clothes, the glamour of it all.

I just sort of became my character.

[speaks in foreign language]

When I played Mary Kom,

I was very skeptical taking it on in the beginning

because she was a living, breathing icon

and she made plays for so many female athletes.

And plus, I look nothing like her.

She comes from the Northeast of India

and I am, you know, from Northern India

and we physically didn't look alike.

In hindsight, yes, it should have probably,

the part should have probably been gone to someone

from the Northeast,

but I was just greedy as an actor

to be able to get my hands to tell her story

because she inspired me as a woman so much,

as an Indian woman so much, as an athlete.

And when the filmmakers insist that I do it,

I was just like, You know what? I'm gonna do it.

I went and met Mary. I spend time in her home.

I met her children. I met her husband.

I had to spend almost five months training

to learn the sport, which is not easy by the way,

for anyone who's not tried it.

That's hard to do.

And to physically alter my body as well,

to get into an athlete's shape.

So physically it was really tough,

mentally it was really tough.

And because I physically didn't look like her,

I decided to embody her spirit.

So I spent a lot of time with her

so that she could educate me about what her choices were,

why she made the choices that she did.

And to me, it's one of my most special movies

that I've ever done because of working so closely with her.

[traditional music]

None of the threats today were real.

The only real threat was you.

Go on.

The exercise was built on information

provided to us by you.

The information is only worth anything

if you trust the source that it came from.

I've been acting in the Hindi language for such a long time

and culturally that's very different

than speaking in English and acting in English

and being someone who's been born and raised in America

versus being someone who's been born and raised in India.

Those are two different girls.

So now I have to quickly understand what that girl was like.

Having spent time in the States as a teenager,

it wasn't too alien.

So I got a dialect coach to work with me

for my American accent.

And I walked in and I remember holding my breath

for a second and being like, Oh, shit.

I went to the bathroom and this was one of those moments

that you would probably see in a romantic comedy,

where the actress is like looking at herself in the mirror

and saying, You got this.

But I swear to God, I did that.

I looked at myself in the mirror and I was like,

You're like 40 movies old.

Your movies, some of them have like blown up the box office.

You kind of know how to do this.

And I had to like really tell myself that,

that I know how to do this job, like this is what I do.

This is like literally my profession.

Contained myself, had a sip of water, walked into the room,

did the best that I could, got the job thankfully.

Then again, it changed the trajectory of my life

because I was, you know, the first Indian actor ever

to headline a network TV show,

and to have someone South Asian playing

a mainstream character on mainstream TV or movies

was very like, you didn't see that a lot at all.

Even now, you know, there's just a few of us

that are sort of holding that flag strong.

But at that time there were very few

and you know, the pilot happened,

it did what it did and kind of changed my life.

You were playing us and you even left clues

in each room to taunt us.

And you have the key to all of it in your hand

the whole time.

For people who have been to India,

you will understand how different America as a country is

and India as a country is.

Two of the biggest movie industries in the world,

but two completely different cultures.

And as an actor, I talk with my hands.

I'm loud, I'm expressive, I'm big.

And that's what our movies are.

You know, Indian movies are big, loud, expressive.

But when I first started working on Quantico,

I used to hear from my directors,

You know, Priyanka just...

Let's like, just take it down a little bit.

I was like, What does that mean?

Take down my decibel, am I loud?

Like, you know, maybe just a little smaller.

I've heard that a lot

when I first started acting in America.

That kind of had to pivot a little bit into understanding

as someone who would have grown up in a different culture,

how they would react to a situation

versus how someone would grown up in a different country,

how they would react.

So it took me a lot of observing, understanding,

working with acting coaches and listening to filmmakers,

watching my co-actors with the choices that they made,

exactly how I had done 10 years ago

when I first joined Bollywood movies.

Why would I shoot he man we both love?

Damn it.

I got out, Balram.

What is it that you wanna do?

I want to serve you and Ashok-

No. Okay, stop. No, no stop saying that.

That's why this caste system thing is total bullshit.

When I first read The White Tiger, the novel,

I was like, This movie can't happen without me.

I love this movie too much.

So I called my agents and I offered my services

and I said, I would love to EP the movie.

I would love to push it.

I'd love to help market it,

you know, support it as much as I can

so it gets as many eyeballs as it can.

So I met Ramin Bahrani, I chased him.

When I want something, I really do go after it.

I auditioned for him like two or three times for Pinky.

Once we did a reading, just him and me too.

And I almost had my husband holding the camera,

but Ramin was like, No, that'd be too distracting.

I really worked on wanting that movie

because I reached a point where I was craving

for the artist in me to feel unsure

and to feel, you know, like I had to dig deep.

I just sort of needed an immersive experience

and that's what it was.

And I'm so proud of that movie.

You know Mukesh tried to stop Ashok from marrying me

because of this caste thing?

Well fuck him, and fuck that.

We met a long time ago.

Good morning.

Sati.

My father knew we'd meet again.

Oh, he would have wished for happier circumstances.

You know, Matrix 4 is as mainstream as it gets.

It took 10 years but here we are.

It took 10 years of knocking on doors

and making introductions and sort of hoping to be a part

of mainstream global Vox culture and working towards it.

And I feel really grateful to be getting those opportunities

and I feel sort of an acceptance with my colleagues.

And that's a really great feeling,

but yet, walking onto the set of Matrix 4

with the legacy that that stands for,

I just wanted to stay quiet and be a fly on the wall

and watch everyone do what they do.

This is an incredible cast and incredible movie

that had come together

and I just remember being starstruck the whole time.

I'm sorry. You knew what happened to him?

You knew that he and Trinity both were alive

and you didn't tell me?

There were times I doubted my decision Niobe.

But Io needed you.

This city needed to be built for your people

as well as mine.

The world Wachowski have created,

it's like nothing else

and no one else would ever be able to do that.

I mean The Matrix changed movies for me,

for so many people in our generation.

And I was just really, really grateful to be a small part

of such a large legacy, just very, very exciting.

When you become a public person,

the court of public opinion is where everything

is decided for you.

I was okay with that for a very long time.

I thought that was part of the job.

I thought that, you know, I had to live up

to people's expectations, yes,

but more than that to people's opinions.

And now on the other side of 35,

I realized that that was futile.

You know, people's opinions don't make your career.

What you do between action and gut,

that'll make your career.

Took me a long time to understand that.

[slow music]