How Priyanka Chopra took the giant leap from Bajirao Mastani to Quantico
By the time Bajirao Mastani was released in her home country, she’d vaulted to the West.
It was during the filming of Bajirao Mastani that Priyanka simultaneously leapt across the Atlantic to transform into Alex Parrish, the trouser-wearing federal agent of Quantico. She’d film the ABC serial in New York and elsewhere in the US until Friday night, sleep on the long-haul flight to Mumbai and report for work over the weekend in the traditional nine-yard saree of Kashibai before going back to filming Quantico from Monday morning.
By the time Bajirao Mastani was released in her home country, she’d vaulted to the West.
“You’ve never arrived enough not to explore new opportunities” – Priyanka
Exhorting her audience to become “the best version of you,” she said, “At every step, I set a higher standard… There’s only one of you. You’re never too old or too experienced not to learn something new.”
For her, the competition was never over. And Pradeep Guha’s old observation about her positivity and fearlessness would take over. Tarun Mansukhani described how her mind worked when she took the big leap from the glossy Indianness of Bajirao Mastani to the gritty crime scene of Quantico.
“When Quantico was still being thought about, she’d read the script, we had conversations about it. At no point did she feel, am I going to end it all? That was never the question,” Tarun disclosed.
“Whether it was about ending it here or doing television that may not succeed, wasn’t the debate. It was a question of, ‘What will I achieve by doing this?’ The answer would be, ‘You’ll become the first Indian girl to cross over and make a mark for yourself.’ Which became a goal for her, more than the money or the fame. She doesn’t look at the negatives. She doesn’t come to you and say, ‘Oh shit, this may happen to me, I’ll get screwed.’ She doesn’t think of those things. Which can sometimes bother me because she doesn’t think of the consequences. It’s more of, why not rather than why? Utterly inspiring but I get scared for her. What if it goes wrong for her?”
Like most of her other leaps, Quantico too was something she went into after deliberating over it with friends and family.
“She will take opinions from all her friends. Possibly never listen to any of them,” Tarun smiled. “But ask, she will. Like she did discuss Quantico with me. She had lengthy conversations about it with me. I’d ask her, ‘Are you the central character? What if they suddenly screw you over and change the character to some American girl?’ She had answers, she was on that side, I was asking the questions. As a friend, it was my job to play Devil’s Advocate. She wasn’t pessimistic. Her answer would be, ‘It’s contractual, they can’t do that, so move on, next.’”
Move on, is exactly what she did, charting her course by breaking into the West first as singer, going to the glitziest of functions and being interviewed on the most-watched talk shows. For her, it was simply the next step northward but the physical distance also gave breathing time to an imminent heartbreak back home. Additionally, she made the most of Hollywood’s new hunt for diversity and pitched herself as the perfect candidate for the job.
As Ranjita Ganesan and Manavi Kapur observed in Business Standard:
“In retrospect, PC’s 2013 pop track set in Miami Beach and featuring rapper Pitbull could easily have been the pitch that led to her recent big break. The Bollywood actress-turned-singer who crooned about being ‘exotic’ and ‘hotter than the tropics’ has emerged two years later as the newest find in US television’s growing bid for diversity.”
Priyanka herself claimed that it was more about spotting an opportunity than a strategised move. She said to friend and editor Jitesh Pillai of Filmfare that her current manager Anjula Acharya who ran a record label called Desi Hits in America, heard her in Abhishek Bachchan’s rap number "Right Here Right Now" from Bluffmaster (2005) in which she had co-starred.
That was the time Abhishek had famously nicknamed her Piggy Chops and it was he who had rapped the popular number. Priyanka had largely lip-synced to lines sung by playback singer Sunidhi Chauhan. But Vishal-Shekhar, the music directors of Bluffmaster, had heard Priyanka sing a line and had recorded a number with her, a number that lies unreleased to this day, a number that Anjula happened to hear which made her repeatedly call Priyanka, asking her to come to London and record a couple of songs with Universal Music.
The songs went from Universal to Interscope Records where co-founder Jimmy Iovine loved what he heard. Catching the ear of a big name like Jimmy in the music business put Priyanka on the road to becoming a legitimate recording artiste. Starry-eyed and dizzy, she found herself in the world of Pitbull and will.i.am and spent months going back and forth between India and America.
“I went through this whole magical phase of flying to Los Angeles every four months even as I was doing films like Gunday, Mary Kom,” she told Filmfare.
It was Jimmy who pointed her in the direction of Hollywood as an actor. And a chance meeting with Keli Lee of ABC at a party turned her into Alex Parrish.
It didn’t come to her on a platter. She followed one of her own self-set rules. “You’ve never arrived enough not to explore new opportunities” which was easier said than done. But she did it; few in her position would have.
As Sanjay Bhansali said, “Priyanka gives her all to an opportunity, so they keep coming to her.” She shed her pride, didn’t carry along the baggage of the celebrity status she was used to, went through the process of introducing herself, “I’m Priyanka Chopra, I’m an Indian actor”, auditioned the part and won the crown again.
Like the ingénue from Bareilly who’d stood at the Millennium Dome in 2000 and then done the star trek in Hindi cinema, the desi girl from India presented her credentials to the West, living out the rules she had set in stone en route.
Like many, Priyanka speaks two kinds of English. With her own countrymen, it’s the sophisticated Indian English that she always spoke fluently. But Alex Parrish and Victoria Leeds of Baywatch spoke like Americans – it entailed training with a dialect coach. She became an American in those roles, not an Indian playing a part in an American series or movie. That was her biggest achievement, that was what she’d signed up for, making American kids want to be like Alex Parrish, the kickass agent who greeted New Yorkers from huge hoardings announcing the arrival of Quantico.
She did everything a celebrity in Hollywood would do. She walked the red carpet at the Oscars, she was on massive hoardings, she was on magazine covers all year long and she had her pinch-me moment when Time magazine put her on the cover as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
(Excerpted with the permission of Om Books International)