SHE is a dazzlingly beautiful Miss World turned Bollywood and Hollywood movie star – but Priyanka Chopra admits she still gets trolled over her looks.
You might think Priyanka, 40, who gets up hours early to work out before leaving home for a day’s filming, would ignore such jibes on social media.
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But she confesses they can reduce her to tears.
She broke down just last month and had to be comforted by her US singer husband Nick Jonas after someone pointed out her lack of a size 6 figure.
Indian Priyanka said: “Someone said I wasn’t sample size. I was hurt and cried to my husband.
“I felt really bad that I’m not that size and apparently it is a problem. Most of us aren’t.
“I’ve been told many things which are very difficult to hear, and I cry.
“You see people saying the meanest and nastiest things, not just about me, but about my child, about my family members. Sometimes people forget that you are human.”
She added: “Those pressures are inexplicable, like I can’t explain to you how it feels when you’re sitting down on your couch and you just feel the world coming at you because people have forgotten you’re human.
“What you have to do is surround yourself with people that love you.”
After moving with her family from India to the US at age 13, she started out as a model, then after her Miss World win in 2000 was offered film roles.
But for years Priyanka, who has starred in countless Bollywood films and latterly Hollywood ones such as Baywatch in 2017 and 2021 sci-fi blockbuster The Matrix Resurrections, has battled sexism and prejudice.
It is only now, alongside Bodyguard star Richard Madden in Amazon Prime sci-fi series Citadel which launches at the end of this month, that she feels she is on an equal footing with her male co-stars.
‘I learnt to do film stunts, I trust my body’
She said: “I’ve been working in the entertainment industry for 22 years, I have done almost 70 features. But Citadel is the first time in my career that I have pay parity with my male co-actor.
“Amazon Studios said, ‘That’s what you deserve — you are co-leads, that’s just fair.’ And I was like, ‘You’re right, it is fair.’ I put in the same amount of time, I put in the same amount of investment and work.”
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In Citadel, an action thriller about a global spy agency, Priyanka plays former elite agent Nadia Sinh and is seen jumping across tables and spinning around with guns.
She and co-star Richard, 36, even worked out together to get into shape, as she insisted on doing as many of her own stunts as she could.
Priyanka said of their regime: “It’s really hard for one and a half years to stay disciplined, through Christmas and Diwali, and stay fit and train five days a week.
“Richard and I both used to wake up at 4am and train before we even started filming. It required a huge amount of discipline and dedication.”
But that commitment is nothing new for Priyanka.
She said: “When I did Bollywood movies I used to train with the stunt team. I didn’t have an amazing body double because I was the girl.
“Of course the guys had three or four body doubles.
“I learnt to do my stunts because I wanted to look as good as the boys.
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“My male co-actor’s stunt double was killing it and my poor double wasn’t killing it as much because that was not her skill set. So I learnt how to do a lot of that stuff myself.
“I still trust my body and I see stunt doubles who come in and just do the fight. Most of the time they don’t think like the character would. So now I work very closely with my stunt doubles. I usually do most of my stuff first so that they can see how my character reacts to being punched or punching.
“And then the next day, for the wide shots and stuff — whatever the insurance company won’t allow me to do — my stunt double ended up doing for Citadel.”
But Priyanka says too often in the American film industry she has been pigeon-holed by casting directors — although not in Citadel.
She said: “I’ve had an incredible opportunity to work with tremendously talented filmmakers in India, across genres, across characters, but I’m still seeking to do that here in America.
“And Citadel really gave me an opportunity to showcase a character that had depth, who was strong but also vulnerable.”
Priyanka says she and Richard worked really hard because they both believe in the series so much.
She added: “It was a lot of tears and pain because we shot it during Covid.
“We were in a bubble and not allowed to meet people — away from our families.
“It was hard. But everyone was there for a reason. We all became sort of a family.”
Priyanka’s family is now Nick — one-third of American hitmakers Jonas Brothers alongside his siblings Joe and Kevin — and the couple’s daughter Malti Marie, who turned one in January.
She met Nick in 2017 at an Oscars after-party where he immediately got down on one knee in front of a packed room and said: “You’re real. Where have you been all my life?”
Now the couple, who married the following year, live in a Los Angeles mansion with Malti Marie, who was born via surrogate.
Priyanka says surrogacy was “a necessary step” because she had medical complications.
But their daughter spent 100 days in hospital before finally being allowed to come home.
Priyanka said: “I have an incredibly supportive partner who is the wind beneath my wings. And we both balance each other’s lives and careers, because both are important to us.”
Her career includes acting and producing as well as running a hair-care company called Anomaly, which has become the second-richest celebrity beauty brand of 2023, just behind Bajan chart-topper Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty.
‘I joke with family, order silly food, watch TV’
But while Priyanka once pushed herself so hard at work that she ended up in hospital, she now says she has found a good work-life balance thanks to 30-year-old Nick and their daughter.
She said: “I came from India with an ethos of the harder you work, the more successful you will be — the more run down to the ground you are, the more you deserve where you’re supposed to get, and the higher you will go is because of the harder you will work.
“You know, like burn the candle on both ends.
“It was romanticised during my twenties. I didn’t take my first holiday till at least ten years into working. I was just like, ‘Oh, I’m going to do five movies a year, I’m going to work the hardest. I don’t need to sleep, I don’t need to eat’ — until I was in the hospital for ten days.
“Now I tell my team, ‘I’m not available after 7pm today’.
“I won’t be because I need to have time for my family. I want to tell jokes, I want to order silly food, I want to watch TV or whatever — you know, or talk to my mum.
“I did not know this in my twenties. I actually figured it out in my thirties, to separate work and home, you have to separate that.
“You can’t bring your work home, and you can’t take your home to work.
“As soon as that compartment-alisation happens, you’re able to achieve so much more.”
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