Unfinished

by Priyanka Chopra Jonas

  With each new role, on each new set, and with each new director, I was learning more and more about what it took physically, mentally, and emotionally to be an actor, and what I needed in order to do my best work. A big part of all that was how I wanted to be treated. Early on, when a producer offered me less than 10 percent of what my male co-actor would be receiving for basically the same amount of work on a blockbuster film, I stood up for myself and suggested that I should be paid a little more. His response was, “You can ask for more money and make your point, sure, but you know that in these roles in these kinds of films, girls are interchangeable. If you don’t take this opportunity as it is, some other girl will come along and grab it and be very happy about it.”

  It seems that the director on the set of the seduction song thought that girls were interchangeable, too. I wanted to be respected for what I brought to the table, not merely regarded as one object for titillation that could be readily swapped out for another. Quitting that movie at such an early stage in my career was extremely hard, because word travels fast in the entertainment industry no matter where in the world you are, and I didn’t want to get a reputation as someone who caused trouble or couldn’t be relied upon to behave professionally. But it needed to be done. Even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time, I knew that maintaining my self-respect was more important than saving a big role.

  The steepness of my learning curve continued. I understood more and more clearly that to build and maintain a career, I would need to do some serious networking. The early awards that I’d won were helpful, but they weren’t enough to ensure that I would continue to work, because nobody knew me, and Bollywood was ruled by people who’d grown up in it together.

  Writing a memoir jogs your memory, bringing to light things that have been pushed below the level of awareness, things that we might rather forget. One such memory—or in my case, a series of memories—relates to the nature of the favoritism that existed in the Hindi film industry when I was coming up. I faced it at many points in my career. Think of it as related to the kind of bullying that often takes place during the teenage years in a school setting: it’s so much a part of the culture that rather than push back, you just accept it.

  The Bollywood system was known at the time for having “insiders”—people with generational ties to the business—and “outsiders.” If you didn’t have an “insider’s” familiarity with the powerful people, or the lifelong social bonds to fall back on, it was a struggle. You would have to work much harder to prove your talent and to earn the kinds of roles you wanted. As a nineteen-year-old newcomer to the entertainment world, it felt like a big boys’ club that I’d never be able to break into. Over and over again I had to prove to the studios, which were mostly family-owned, that I deserved a seat at their table—which was not so easy when I overheard comments at parties like “I got her cast in this movie and I can take it away from her as well” (eventually and unfortunately, the woman who made the remark did just that) and “She’ll never make it as an actress, too kaali.” I find it so painfully ironic that in a country populated by people who are all shades of brown, the standard of beauty is white. Hearing comments that dismissed me in such a matter-of-fact way was distressing, but I could steel myself against them and try to ignore them. The most difficult times for me, the moments when I felt the most hopeless, were when I was let go from projects because a co-actor, director, or producer who had grown up at the table wanted to gift a role to someone else. That always crushed me.

  Relatively early in my career, the lead actor of a movie I was about to start shooting came to visit me on the set of a film I was then working on. “Listen, Priyanka,” he said casually, “you may not be able to do this movie because I’ve promised the role to someone else.” (The “someone else,” I soon found out, was his girlfriend.) Stunned, I said that I’d already signed the contract and was counting on starting in just a few days. He shrugged. “We’ll find something else for you to do.” His tone was almost benevolent. It was the first time this had happened to me—it happened again a few years later—but, as I had been discovering, it was not all that unusual for things to unfold this way. As I look back now, the episode makes me shudder, not with disbelief at its occurrence or at how many others may have faced nearly identical situations, but because I did not raise my voice at that time.

  As I have said, though, this favoritism was so normalized in that place and time that it simply never occurred to me to push back in any significant way. I had to work within the system, and so I worked within the system. But I can tell you that it was an isolating experience, one that slowly chipped away at my self-confidence. I felt like I was being bullied. And because I had been bullied before, I had some mechanisms to deal with it. After my high school experience, I was hell-bent on not succumbing or pandering just because it was expected that I do so. As a fifteen-year-old in Massachusetts, I had tried to soldier through the bullying but I hadn’t had the internal resources. This time, I decided to stick it out no matter what. I put my head down, did my work, and blocked out as much as I could.

  Fortunately, in the film industry as in life, the actions of a few don’t always reflect the behavior of the whole. There were plenty of people in the Hindi film industry who focused on the talent of the actors they approached and on their ability to connect to an audience. There were others who had worked their way up before me, and there are those who will continue to do so after me. I was able to get—and keep—enough roles to build a solid career. Initially this fueled me. It also encouraged me to think beyond conventional opportunities and sink my teeth into characters and roles that I quite possibly would not have explored otherwise. It forced me to delve into areas that were outside my comfort zone. At the end of the day, the audience accepted me, and I forged a career I’m proud of.

  The thing about favoritism and patriarchy is that they make it an unfairly steep climb for a large number of talented, deserving people—whatever the field. Having experienced that long, hard climb myself made me want to be part of the community that’s working to make it easier for those who follow. We can’t choose the family we were born into but we can choose our actions. We all want to take care of the people we are closest to, those sitting at our table. But is there a world in which those who are blessed with more might build a larger table rather than building a higher fence?

  * * *

  BY THE TIME I’d been working for a few years, I’d fallen in love with the work and with the industry. It no longer mattered much if I had to wait around for hours for my male co-actors to make it onto set; it didn’t matter if I was wearing a flimsy chiffon sari in the snow, or a fur jacket in the heat of Mehboob Studio in Mumbai; it didn’t matter if a hundred people watched me while I danced in the streets. I was in love with the movies. I often chose not to return to my trailer between shots, preferring instead to stay on set. I delighted in the hustle and bustle of movies being made.

  So much of filmmaking, I realized, was about feeling confident, and I also realized that knowledge is a key to confidence. If you have the knowledge of something, you can walk into almost any room and hold your own. I relished honing my skills, learning and improving and growing. I loved taking lines of dialogue and transforming them into a multidimensional person with a past and a future and a unique take on the world. I developed a hunger for seeing how many personalities I could create, and how different they could be. Wondering what kind of person I’ll be breathing life into next is one of the many things that keep me excited about this job of mine.

  One of the ways I developed my skills was through studying my co-actors and my directors. I’d watch the directors and try to figure out why they made certain requests or decisions, even on the technical side of filmmaking—why would the director of photography choose a certain lens or want a change in lighting, for instance, or why would he suddenly go from a wide shot to a close-up—and that started giving me a larger lens through
which to look at the way stories are told in this medium.

  The more I studied my co-actors, the more I became convinced that the actors who made the most lasting impressions were the ones who did two things. First, they truly listened in every one of their scenes rather than just waiting to say their lines. Acting is primarily reacting truthfully in the moment, and that is dictated organically by what your co-actors do. Second, they found ways to communicate multiple thoughts and feelings simultaneously. In my experience, only children have isolated emotions. If a little child is angry, he’s angry. If she’s excited, she’s excited. But as we evolve into adults, our emotional and intellectual capacities broaden and deepen, and expressing this complexity is one of the jobs of the actor. Think about it. Say you’re having a terrible argument with your sister because you’ve discovered that she’s been telling your parents hurtful lies about you. You might be furious at her, and you also might be feeling deeply betrayed. And of course you still love her. You’ve discovered her lies just as you were about to leave for an important appointment and now you’re worried that you’re going to be late. Then there’s the physical piece—maybe it’s a sweltering day and the air-conditioning isn’t working, or it’s a frigid day and the heat isn’t up high enough. All of these things could be going on more or less simultaneously.

  If I were playing a scene with a character in these circumstances, I would map out what my character is feeling at any given moment in the scene and what she’s thinking but not saying. I’d figure out which emotion of the several that she’s feeling is the one that has to dominate because of the story arc. I’d think about where she’s coming from and where she’s going, and how she responds physically, emotionally, and intellectually to the world and the challenges she encounters in it. A writer writes a film, and a director has a vision for it. As I see it, my job as an actor is to translate the words on the page into the compelling journey of my character between “Action!” and “Cut!” And this is why I love creating characters.

  I had the chance to dive into a really meaty character journey early in my career when, in 2003, the successful brother team of Abbas-Mustan offered me a role in their dramatic thriller Aitraaz. I’d been hoping to work with them ever since 2000, when they offered me a role in their romantic thriller Humraaz after my Miss India win. It was the first role I’d ever been offered and I desperately wanted to accept it, and in fact had been advised by many to sign on. But the Miss World pageant was approaching and I didn’t want to create any conflicts in the crazy eventuality that I came home with the crown—I did want the crown, no matter how minuscule the chances were that I’d get it—so I declined the role. When the opportunity to do Aitraaz came along, I grabbed it.

  Aitraaz gave me the chance to play a really bold character—power- and money-hungry, sexually voracious, and willing to stop at nothing to get what she wants. Better yet, it showed me that I could create and inhabit a complicated character that many would find distasteful, and I could do it credibly and compellingly. The movie swept audiences up in its tale of love and betrayal and was a huge success, winning a number of awards. I garnered several, including my second Filmfare Award, this one for Best Actor in a Negative Role. I was only the second female actor to win the award since its inception in 1992—Kajol won it in 1998 for her role in Gupt—and so the honor was especially meaningful to me. (The award was discontinued after 2007, and Kajol and I remain the only two female actors to have received it.) More thrilling than even the awards, though, was the critical acclaim. It was my first taste of such rave reviews, and I began to see that there could be a big payoff to taking risks, that maybe pushing the limits was a way to blaze my own trail instead of doing what was expected of me. In Hindi movies at that time, it was the norm for female leads to play characters who were sympathetic and pure; my character in Aitraaz was anything but, and people warned me that future directors might typecast me into this kind of role, limiting my opportunities. Since childhood I’d always liked to be the first to do or discover things, and creating my own path was a way of staying ahead of the curve. This is not to say that there hadn’t been female actors before me who had played bold parts. There had. But I figured that taking the road less traveled would help me stand out, because, as I was seeing again and again, being different was my superpower. And the possibility that it might expand the playing field for other female actors, too, allowing us all more freedom to play a larger range of roles, made the appeal, and the payoff, even stronger.

  * * *

  LIKE MOST ACTORS, I eventually hit a rough patch in my career. About five years after I started working, a run of six movies I made flopped back to back. That shook me up profoundly. I had invested myself in my chosen profession with everything I had, dropping out of school and working more or less nonstop. Mom and Dad had given up their hospital in Bareilly and moved to Mumbai to help manage my career. Sid was now back from the States and living with us. I had a Plan B—academics—but that meant accepting failure in my chosen field. I’d tasted the sweetness of success and I was hungry for more. I didn’t want to revert to Plan B because I’d failed at Plan A. I needed to turn the tide. I was driven to turn it.

  Time to sink or swim, I told myself. So I leapt into the deep end to try something few female actors were doing at that time in India: a female-led movie. I was warned that female actors usually only did that kind of film as a swan song because it was so risky. Why risky? Because just about all of the resounding box-office successes in the Hindi film industry were male-led. By that point, in professional free fall, perhaps, but at age twenty-five and nowhere near ready for a swan song, I thought a female-led movie would be worth the risk.

  And there was another reason I was ready to take a gamble. After getting thrown off two films because the lead actor wanted the role for his girlfriend, and struggling to get cast in the kinds of big commercial blockbusters I’d imagined I’d work in, I decided to do a partial pivot and focus on unusual, challenging roles that I could win, and keep, based on merit.

  I signed on to do Fashion, a drama helmed by the award-winning director Madhur Bhandarkar, in 2007. The movie follows the rise and fall of Meghna Mathur, a young woman from a small town who moves to Mumbai with the dream of becoming a supermodel. She succeeds, but at an impossibly high price. Meghna drives the story, and she’s surrounded by a slew of other complex and compellingly written female characters. A few of the actors and directors I’d previously worked with suggested that this might not be the best move for me, starring as an extremely flawed character in a film where the action doesn’t revolve around a male. I welcomed the challenge, though, wanting the responsibility of carrying a film. I was already all in with my career. Why not swim a little farther out from shore?

  The movie was grueling both physically and emotionally. I had to gain a lot of weight for the beginning scenes and then lose more than I’d gained to pull off the supermodel look at the end of the movie. Madhur Bhandarkar was a wonderful collaborator and we worked together to create a graph of Meghna Mathur’s evolution, from her ascension to fame and fortune through her ignominious downfall and ultimate resurrection. As a result of trusting my intuition and working with a filmmaker known for directing complex female roles, I followed a road less traveled and won my first National Film Award for Best Actress. Kangana Ranaut won Best Supporting Actress, and Madhur Bhandarkar was nominated for Best Director. The almost bigger achievement, though, was that the film opened strong and did well at the box office, proving that female-led movies were commercially viable. After that, I continued to take on a lot more films that were female-led, and it was largely my experience with Fashion that reaffirmed to me that I was on the right path when I was moving out of the safety zone and into the unexpected.

  And in part, it was my experience with Aitraaz that gave me the courage to sign on to Fashion. Both films feature leading characters whose behavior ranges from unpleasant to edgy to morally offensive to illegal. If I
hadn’t had such success with Sonia, my character in Aitraaz, it would have been a lot harder for me to accept the challenge of bringing Meghna Mathur to life in Fashion.

  Almost simultaneously, on the heels of Fashion’s success, came my next commercial blockbuster, Dostana. The feel-good romantic comedy opened two weeks after the much darker tale of Meghna Mathur, and audiences loved this story of two guys who pretend to be gay in order to secure an apartment in Miami, only to both fall madly in love with their roommate/landlady, played by me. Starring John Abraham and Abhishek Bachchan, directed by Tarun Mansukhani—still one of my closest friends today—and produced by Dharma Productions, an A-list production house, the movie became a runaway success. It featured the catchy hit song “Desi Girl” with music by Vishal-Shekhar and lyrics by Kumaar. Suddenly I had a public nickname: Desi Girl. Even now I’m referred to as Desi Girl—Indian girl—especially in India. Nick performed the song the night before our wedding at our sangeet celebration, winning the hearts of everyone from my home country who was present and understood the reference.