Hollywood star Priyanka Chopra Jonas has revealed for the first time why she quit her native Bollywood industry in India and started fresh in the U.S.
Speaking on the “Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard” podcast, Chopra Jonas, who was a huge star in Bollywood before she moved to the U.S., said: “I was being pushed into a corner in the industry. 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.'”
The break came in the shape of a music career in the U.S. In 2011, Universal Music Group signed Chopra Jonas to a worldwide recording agreement with DesiHits, and part of the deal was that her first studio album would be released by Interscope Records in North America and by Island Records in the rest of the world.
“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 would require 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,” Chopra Jonas said on the podcast. “So when this music thing came, I was like fuck it. I’m gonna go to America, and Interscope was amazing. They threw the building at me.”
Chopra Jonas worked with Pitbull, Will.i.am, RedOne and many others. “I had dinner with Bruce Springsteen and his wife. I was living the dream,” Chopra Jonas said.
Her breakthrough acting role in the U.S. was ABC’s “Quantico.” “I read the pilots. 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 realized 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 said.
Next up for the actor is the Russo Brothers’ Amazon Prime Video series “Citadel.”
“Because it’s a global spy organization, that is going to be the American show. It’s an English-language show. 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,” Chopra Jonas 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.”
