Unfinished

by Priyanka Chopra Jonas

  I left the director/producer’s office feeling stunned and small. Was he right that I couldn’t be successful unless I had so many body parts “fixed”? I thought of how individuals in the media and others in the industry had referred to me as “dusky” and “different-looking,” and I wondered if I was cut out for this business after all. All the talk of body parts and skin tone collectively made me feel devalued and unseen and uncertain about my future. Having experienced the aftermath of a supposedly simple polyp removal, I knew I wasn’t willing to follow the course he’d laid out for me, even if he, as the highly successful expert, was right. And needless to say, I parted ways with my then-manager not long after.

  Looking back, I see that this early feedback I was getting from some of the players in the industry taught me one of the first, and most important, lessons that I was to learn over the next few years, a lesson I had understood in another context when I’d returned home from the States and insisted on expressing myself through my style: My difference is my strength. If I looked like other “classically beautiful” girls, then I wouldn’t stand out, and more important, I wouldn’t be me. I’m grateful that some instinct back then told me not to fall prey to the insecurity of not fitting into the existing mold. I took a hard line with myself and made what some considered my weakness into my strength, and I believe that’s part of what has given my career its trajectory.

  * * *

  THE INDIAN FILM industry releases close to two thousand films each year—almost double that of Hollywood. With estimates ranging from one to two billion movie tickets sold annually in India, it is the leading film market in the world. Then add on all the revenue generated by ticket sales to Indian movies outside India—estimated to be between $300 and $500 million a year for the past few years—and it’s easy to understand how the country’s film business thrives.

  Indian cinema is composed of many smaller, local film industries. The Hindi-language industry based in Mumbai that’s popularly known as Bollywood is by far the largest of these local industries. When many Western film viewers hear the term “Bollywood,” they may think of the kind of big-budget production that mixes together several genres in one film—what used to be called a “masala” film. Masala, as anyone who appreciates a good Indian meal knows, refers to a mixture of ground spices. Similarly, in film, it means a mixture of different elements or genres. Action, romance, drama, and comedy, punctuated by lavish musical numbers with dancing and lip-synced singing, may all coexist happily together in one film. While the Hindi film industry is famous in the West largely for its masala movies—they’re not actually called masala movies anymore; they’re just called commercial blockbusters—that’s way too confining a box to contain the ebulliently robust industry. Hindi movies include every type of film you could possibly imagine: dramas, biopics, historical sagas, thrillers, comedies, romances, documentaries, horror movies, quirky art-house films, and more. And given that most Hindi-language films are available with subtitles, I’m happy to say there’s something for just about everyone in both of the countries I call home.

  Within six months of winning the Miss World crown, I signed on for four movies. Three of them were Bollywood projects, and one was a Tamil film. I was full of energy and hope and I was ready to work. Then the bridge of my nose collapsed and I started undergoing corrective surgery to normalize it. I was dropped from two big movies—my very first acting jobs, movies that were to have launched me—after the producers heard rumors that I looked different post-surgery. One producer did me the courtesy of arranging a screen test, or a “look” test, to see what my face would look like blown up on 70mm film to movie-screen size. The second producer didn’t even bother with a look test. As if the physical and emotional pain of the original and subsequent corrective surgeries weren’t enough, this was a terrible blow. My career, a career based so much on physical appearance, seemed to be over before it had even really started. I felt as if a doorway to paradise had been opened and then slammed in my face. And it hurt.

  Anil Sharma, the director of the third Hindi movie I’d signed on for, The Hero, decided to keep me on but changed my role to a supporting one. “No one will know until the movie comes out that you were originally supposed to do a different role,” he told me. “At least you’ll be part of one of the biggest movies of the year. And I promise you, you’ll still be on the poster.” A previous film of his, Gadar, had broken all records in India, so keeping me on was a very kind thing to do, especially given that I was literally just starting out. His compassion and consideration meant the world to me and turned out to be a preview of the kind of thoughtfulness I would encounter from a number of individuals in Hindi cinema.

  The fourth movie I’d been signed to ended up being the very first movie I shot: Thamizhan. It was a Tamil film, and what a gift it was.

  With twenty-two official languages spread out over the twenty-eight states and eight union territories that make up India, almost every state in the country has its own language. The language of Bollywood movies is Hindi, but not everyone in India speaks Hindi. The language spoken in Tamil Nadu, the southernmost state of our country, is Tamil, and that state has a huge film industry that speaks the language and culture of its own people. While my Hindi film plans had more or less imploded, there was never a question—as far as I’m aware, at least—that I wouldn’t shoot Thamizhan, which starred the amazing actor Vijay in the role of a crusading lawyer. I played his girlfriend. I didn’t speak Tamil, but I had a Tamil coach who helped me learn the lines phonetically, and I did my best from there.

  Thamizhan was the perfect first film for me. In Tamil Nadu, more than eight hundred miles from Mumbai, I found myself surrounded by a supportive and talented cast and crew in a situation where I could do a good job and feel respected for it. The opportunity to do solid work without any discussion of how my looks had changed allowed me to regain some of the confidence that had been ebbing away. And working with the gifted and gracious actor Vijay on my first movie was tremendously inspiring and instructive. We shot outdoors, and there were fans who stood behind the barriers for hours and hours just to get a glimpse of him. After wrapping a fifteen-hour day, he would greet those who’d waited and take photographs with them for another hour and a half.

  Vijay’s humility and his generosity with fans made a lasting impression on me. Almost a decade and a half later, a portion of the pilot episode of Quantico was filmed in front of the imposing New York Public Library, and there was a line around the block of people watching. As I stood and took pictures with them through my lunch break, I thought about my very first co-actor ever and the example he’d set.

  Reconstructive surgery and film work went pretty much hand in hand for the next two years. By the time I started my next movie, Andaaz—with Lara Dutta in the female lead and Akshay Kumar as the male lead—my face looked a bit closer to the one I used to see in the mirror before the polypectomy. The Andaaz opportunity seemed like the answer to my prayers, a second—or third—chance to have a major role in a major movie. Since I knew what it felt like to have big chances slip away, I was determined to make the most of this one. I was now filming The Hero and Andaaz together, and perhaps it should have been intimidating for me, a twenty-year-old, to be working on these film sets with major actors and directors. But I had already worked on the Tamil movie, been in two extremely high-profile pageants, and endured the public fallout from my nasal surgery. I’d spent plenty of time in the public gaze and gained a bit of moviemaking experience. With so much at stake, I refused to be daunted by these somewhat daunting circumstances. In my race not to fail, I would do whatever needed to be done, address whatever problems I needed to address. That was my mindset.

  And so all was going well on set until one day my lack of experience caught up with me. We were filming a romantic song on a gorgeous afternoon in Cape Town, South Africa. The director wanted a shot that opened with my co-actor Akshay Kumar and me in a sunlit fi
eld of yellow flowers. I was to spin joyously with my arms spread wide, run through the flowers toward Akshay, do another spin with him, then propel myself into his arms and start lip-syncing the lyrics of “Allah Kare Dil Na Lage” to the melodious voice of Alka Yagnik. There was plenty of that wonderful slow-motion movement—running and hair flipping included—that I’d dreamed of doing in a big film. The air was soft, the sun was shining down on us, and everything was perfect. Except that I was completely blowing it.

  Although the choreography didn’t include any complicated steps, it did have just enough stylized movement to throw me off. Each time I tried the sequence, I’d mess up some piece of it and we’d have to start all over again. We needed a crane to get the scene, and the reset was relatively slow because it was a wide shot. It was the end of the day, we were losing light, and I was on take thirty. Or thirty-five. The pressure was on.

  Finally, the choreographer Raju Khan threw the mic down and told me to pack up for the day. “Just because you’re Miss World, don’t presume you can dance. Learn to do your job before you report for work!”

  Coincidence and timing were operating in my favor, though. The film had to break unexpectedly for ten days, and filming in Cape Town temporarily ceased. Dharmesh Darshan, the brother of the Andaaz producer Suneel Darshan, had seen me crying off set after the humiliating episode with Raju, and he gave me the name of the renowned classical dance teacher and actor Pandit Veeru Krishnan. “Call him as soon as you get back home,” Dharmesh Sir suggested, as most of the cast and crew were returning to Mumbai. (Culturally, it’s common in India to add a suffix to someone’s name as a form of respect for seniority in age or authority. “Ji,” for example is a common one. My father used “sir” and “ma’am” as part of military protocol. I adopted the habit of “sir” from him.) And so of course I did. Veeruji, or Guruji to his students, was known for his ability to transform nondancers into dancers, so he was the go-to guy for new actors. I started taking classes with him alongside a few other newcomers whom I’d already crossed paths with, like Lara, Harman Baweja, Sameera Reddy, and Katrina Kaif, as well as others I’d continue to be connected to in the future. And my mom. Yep. While she was in medical school, she also did postgraduate studies in Kathak dance, one of the eight forms of Indian classical dance. When I started studying Kathak with Guruji, Mom decided she wanted to refresh her skills and take classes with me. And maybe show off a little.

  I worked for almost eight hours a day with Guruji while I was on break in Mumbai, and suddenly I found coordination. Guruji and Kathak infused it straight into me. My hands knew what to do. My feet knew what to do. My head knew what to do. When I returned to Cape Town a couple of weeks later to shoot the same shot with the same music and the same choreography, Raju Khan, happily surprised, said, “I don’t know what you did, but now you’re a dancer.”

  The episode was another critical piece in the foundation of my career. It taught me the difference between being an amateur and a professional, and how essential it is to be prepared. From that experience onward, I’ve always prepped assiduously before going onto any set. As best I could, I’ve developed whatever skills are necessary to portray my characters convincingly. That might mean a new martial art form for action sequences, or a new type of dance for dance sequences. Or I might learn a different accent, or even bits of a new language, as I did for Bajirao Mastani and Kaminey, when I learned enough Marathi to convincingly portray my characters, and season three of Quantico when I learned Italian well enough to speak the dialogue that required it. For the biopic Mary Kom, I learned how to box. For Don, I learned tai chi, and for The Legend of Drona, I learned Gatka, a Sikh martial art. I also learned to ride—which I absolutely hated, having had a bad fall from a horse when I was eight. In fact, I was so scared that we had to use a simulation horse for my close-ups, and here I was supposed to be a warrior. But I don’t choose my characters based on the skills I’ll need to acquire in order to play them. Once I’ve taken on a job, I give 100 percent to it, whether I like every aspect of it or not. For Drona, I persevered until I learned to ride well enough to do what was required for my role.

  My experience in Andaaz was significant in other ways, too. The movie was hugely successful at the box office, which of course was good for the careers of anyone involved with it. It also netted me my first Filmfare Award, which was for Best Debut Female—an award I shared with Lara Dutta! Working with her was such a pleasure; we had traveled together on our millennium pageant journeys, and I’d been grateful to have someone familiar to me on set on one of my first big movies. And now we had both won recognition as we started our film careers together.

  The choreographer Raju Khan went on to become a dear friend. I always told him that it was his tough love that day that forced me to learn not only the skills necessary to succeed in Hindi movies but the mindset required to succeed in any profession.

  * * *

  I WAS ON a huge learning curve for the first few years of my career, and one of the things that I was learning was that the Hindi film industry was mostly patriarchal: male producers usually called the shots, and things centered on the male actor. I saw this play out on the set of one of my early movies. I would arrive as scheduled at 9:00 a.m. every day. My male co-actor, however, wouldn’t arrive until 4:30 in the afternoon, keeping the crew and all the other actors waiting. That was his pattern and it was simply accepted by the director and the producer.

  “This isn’t fair. I don’t want to do this,” I told my mother over the phone after the first couple of times it happened. To which she responded, “You should be someone whose word is your bond. When you’re finished with the commitments you’ve made and fulfilled the contracts you’ve signed, if you still don’t like the way things are done, then don’t sign any more contracts.”

  When I expressed my frustration to one of my other co-actors, he responded by saying, “It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting and waiting. Your producer has paid you for your participation. It’s your commitment and your work, even if you have to play video games in your trailer while you’re waiting. How they use your time is up to them.” When he put it that way, it made sense and really stuck with me. I should focus on my commitment to the process, not on anyone else’s, and that’s what I’ve endeavored to do ever since.

  My parents did their best to keep my confidence intact as we all tried to figure out the business, taking whatever steps made sense at the time. Perhaps in a nod to what a male-dominated industry the film business was, in the early days of my career, before I hired outside management, my father established one unbreakable rule. “No nighttime meetings, nothing after sundown.” That was it. At the time, of course, I didn’t understand it. Whenever I questioned the rule, he’d stand firm: “All meetings will be in the daytime, when you’ll be in the presence of either Mom or me.” Clearly my father was smart to fear the big bad world of entertainment, which his teenage daughter was so naïvely heading into. I’m convinced that because of his protectiveness and this one absolute, nonnegotiable line in the sand, I was spared from having some of the terrible experiences that so many young people have when they are breaking into the entertainment industry. While I did feel saddened and frustrated by the patriarchy and favoritism of the Bollywood system, I never felt physically threatened during my rise in it, and I attribute that to a combination of luck—bad things can and do happen in broad daylight, all the time, with people close by in the next room—and my father’s wisdom.

  That’s not to say that I didn’t have my share of uncomfortable and unpleasant moments. Like the time my character in a big film was to perform a seduction song during which I would take my clothes off slowly, one piece at a time. Since it was a long song, maybe four minutes, I asked the director if it would be smart for me to have lots of layers to take off so that I wouldn’t be down to skin way too fast.

  “Maybe I could have stockings, and a jacket, and maybe a hair ribbon I could do
something with.” I was picturing all sorts of creative ways to make the number really tantalizing. “You know, various things I could remove before my actual clothes.”

  The director suggested I speak to my stylist, so I called him and briefly explained the situation, then passed the phone to the director. Standing right in front of me, the director said: “Jo bhi ho, chaddiyan dikhni chahiyen. Nahi toh log picture kyon dekne aayenge?”

  Which translates as: “Whatever happens, panties should be seen. Otherwise, why would people come to watch the movie?”

  I quit the next day. When I’d signed on for the job, of course I’d known there was to be a seduction song with the removal of clothes; that was not the problem. The song made sense as part of the story and as something the character would do, being someone who wore her sexuality unself-consciously and for all to see. I was ready to go full-out as a temptress in the number. The director’s words and tone, though, conveyed that he regarded me in a way that I found unacceptable: as a mere commodity for titillation. What I thought I’d been hired as—a professional who brought her talent, hard work, and willingness to embody a character with all her strengths and flaws—and what he apparently thought I’d been hired as—a sexual object—were two irreconcilably different things. The character may have sometimes put herself in the position of being seen as a purely sexual object, but I am not whatever character I am playing, and I wasn’t willing to be directed by someone who saw me that way. Instead, I trusted my intuition and exited.

  When the producer found out I’d quit, he was livid, because we’d already shot for two days. He drove down to another movie set where I was working—it was not uncommon for actors to be shooting multiple movies at a time in the Hindi film business—and strode toward my trailer in what was clearly an agitated state. I was upset, too. I’d known there would be consequences to my leaving, but I didn’t want to be in the center of a big drama, especially given that I was still a relative newcomer. My co-actor Salman Khan, who was and is a huge star in India, understood the situation immediately and intervened on my behalf. He waited outside my trailer, and when the producer arrived, he had a conversation with him that defused the situation. I’m not sure exactly what he said, but the producer was in a much calmer state when he spoke to me. I never told the producer the real reason why I’d left. I was a newcomer in a patriarchal industry and I’d learned that it was better not to poke the bear. Keep your head down and keep smiling was the rule for the girls, and I was already pushing boundaries. So rather than explaining what had actually happened, I told him that I’d misunderstood the character and wasn’t comfortable playing her, and that I’d send them a check to reimburse them for the two days they’d have to reshoot with someone else. Which I did. The money that I returned for the cost of reshooting two days amounted to almost as much as I would have been paid for my twelve to thirteen weeks of work on the movie had I stayed.