Priyanka Chopra Jonas quit Bollywood because she was 'being pushed into a corner': 'I had people not casting me'

Priyanka Chopra Jonas had "beef with people" in Bollywood.

Speaking on the Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard podcast, Chopra Jonas, 40, explained why she ditched a successful Bollywood career for Hollywood. 

Chopra Jonas kicked off her showbiz journey at the age of 17 when she was crowned Miss World in 2000. Three years later, she made her Bollywood debut in The Hero: Love Story of a Spy.

"I was being pushed into a corner in the industry," she recalled.

"I had people not casting me for reasons … I had beef with people. I was tired of the politics. I was just like, ‘I need a break.'"

Things changed when Chopra Jonas, who's married to pop star Nick Jonas, signed a record deal in the US in 2011.

She shared: "This music thing gave me an opportunity to go into another part of the world, not crave for the movies I wanted to get. But I was required to schmooze certain clubs and cliques of people and it would require, like, groveling and I had worked for a long time by then that I didn’t feel like I wanted to do it.

"So when this music thing came, I was like f*** it. I’m gonna go to America, and [record label] Interscope was amazing. They threw the building at me."

Chopra Jonas worked with the likes of Pitbull, Will.i.am, and RedOne. “I had dinner with Bruce Springsteen and his wife. I was living the dream,” she said. 

However, it wasn't her music but acting that got Chopra Jonas recognised in the US — on the procedural Quantico, where she was the first South Asian to headline an American network drama series. The series ran for three seasons, from 2015 to 2018 on ABC.

“I read the pilots," she said. "I knew what the tone of the show was. And I worked with an acting coach. I did the diligence when I went in. And when I got the job, I realised that that’s all it takes. And that comes very naturally to me — prep.

"So with every job that I have gotten from smaller roles in features that I did, which I needed to build my English language filmography, I had a lot of people who knew me from my Indian film days, questioning why I went to Hollywood to do small parts and B-grade movies, is what they would say." 

Chopra Jonas also appeared in Baywatch, The Matrix Resurrections and The White Tiger. Her latest, Citadel, is the epic Amazon Prime Video spy series from Joe and Anthony Russo, in which she stars alongside Richard Madden and Stanley Tucci. 

“Because it’s a global spy organisation, that is going to be the American show. It’s an English-language show," Chopra Jonas said. "And then we have an Indian show, which is my character’s origin story. There is an Italian show, we just finished production, which is another origin story.

"So basically, the stories are all kind of connected, that we move time, we’re in local countries speaking local languages,” she said.

“So the Italian show is in Italian. The social experiment of it all — which is so perfect for Amazon because they’re so global is — will an Italian-speaking person, who consumes their entertainment only in the Italian language, watch a Hindi-language show, because they want to know what happened to that character’s story.”

Citadel premieres on Amazon Prime Video on Apr 28. Quantico is now on Disney+. — BANG SHOWBIZ 

Photo: TPG News/Click Photos

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