I may have chatted with some of the people I met that afternoon, but it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I made any kind of meaningful impact.
And of course there was the music piece of the puzzle, too. Every successful recording artist has their own identifiable sound. Because I’d been developing myself as an actor for years rather than as a singer, I didn’t—yet. When I started recording in the U.S. in 2011, RedOne was brought in to produce the album I was now under contract for. A plan evolved to put me into a room with a variety of different songwriters and artists in order to help me find my own distinct sound and style. Between films in India, I’d fly to L.A. or New York to record, usually for a couple of weeks at a time, and there was always someone incredible for me to try out new things with: will.i.am, who worked with me on the song “In My City,” an energetic, feel-good pop tune about my travels around the world and how a city can give you an identity; Pitbull, who worked with me on “Exotic”; The Chainsmokers, who worked with me on “Erase”; Matt Koma, who worked with me on various songs that still reside somewhere on both of our computers; and a number of others.
Some of the songs seemed to invite an infusion of my Indian identity, and when that was the case, it was really fun and satisfying to figure out the best way to make that happen. We added Indian instrumentation to “In My City” to give it a hint of South Asian flavor. After Pitbull sent in his lyrics for “Exotic,” I suggested to RedOne that we add some Hindi lyrics to it, which I wrote when he agreed. We then incorporated Indian-inspired dance steps into the video for “Exotic” to carry the fusion through to the visual. All of the artists were talented and generous to me and I was energized by working with such masterful collaborators.
In September of 2012, “In My City” was my first single to be released, and a special video version of it was recorded for a weekly pregame promotion spot for the National Football League’s Thursday Night Football on the NFL Network. It was a tremendous honor for me to be chosen by the network and the NFL, and I remember the thrill of turning on the television the first night it aired and seeing myself introducing the game in a prerecorded announcement, and then watching the upbeat “In My City” promo video along with the millions of others who were tuned in. From where I sat, there was no better way for me and my music to be introduced to mainstream America than through an NFL weekly spot. #GameOn!
My bubble was quickly burst. The excitement of having my first song debut in the United States on such a huge platform was completely destroyed by a storm of explicitly racist hate mail and tweets, including—among many, many examples to choose from—“What’s a brown terrorist doing promoting an all-American game?” and “Go back to the Middle East and put your burka on” and—years later it’s still hard to write this—“Go back to your country and get gang-raped.” The song is all about joy and belonging, and yet the barrage of xenophobic messages coming in felt like an endless series of punches to the gut. The assault was shocking in its swiftness and brutality; I had not been prepared to be so publicly attacked on my very first artistic foray in America.
The NFL stood by me and the spot by using the song again for the 2013 game-opener. More than a year after the initial firestorm, in January of 2014, I gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal in which I said that the best way to deal with racism is to “shut down the detractors with your work. Just keep being an achiever and keep achieving, because there are so many people who support you.” I do believe it’s important to keep achieving in the face of your detractors, and I know that there are always supporters out there, too—many came to my defense on social media when the hate mail and racist tweets appeared. But as I look back on the experience now, I see that I was trying to put on a brave face publicly and not let people know how much the venom-filled speech affected me. Maybe I was too new to the business in America to feel that I could show any vulnerability or take any kind of stand, and so I overcompensated by trying to sound positive and strong. Or maybe I was scared. This was different from the Bollywood exclusionism that most “outsiders” in that system had to endure. The biting remarks and the casually cruel conversations that could affect a career in the Hindi film business usually happened in a rarified environment behind closed doors. Here the doors had been flung wide open on to an open-forum display of hostility directed at one person—me—for something I could not change: my ethnicity. If something like that happened today, I hope I’d talk about my belief that the art someone makes shouldn’t be defined by where they were born or the color of their skin. That the virtual spewing of hatred toward those who are different is a lowly form of cowardice.
The release of “In My City” was followed by the release of “Erase” in late 2012 and “Exotic” in 2013. Then, in 2014, we recorded a cover of one of my all-time favorite Bonnie Raitt songs, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” reimagined as EDM by the songwriter Ester Dean, with a music video co-starring Milo Ventimiglia from the hit television series This Is Us.
While “Exotic” went triple platinum in India within a month of its release in 2013, and made the dance and Billboard charts in the U.S., I feel like I never really cracked the code of combining East and West in a way that compelled English-language listeners like we wanted it to. As clear as that fusion of India and America is in me as a person, I couldn’t seem to translate the fusion into sound; I worried that it sounded generic and contrived. Though I’d worked with so many incredibly talented people, my music fell short of my own artistic standards and expectations. After three years of trying my hardest to make my music career work, traveling tens of thousands of miles to record a couple of dozen songs in all styles and genres, I came to the difficult decision that it was time to move on. I’m so grateful to everyone who invested in that part of my journey, and I’m sorry I let you down. Maybe someday…
* * *
I OFTEN THINK about all the accidents of fate in my life that have felt like destiny, affecting who I became. I wanted to be an engineer, when suddenly the pictures Mom and Sid sent to Miss India changed my life forever and gave me a career in the Hindi film industry. Now, after I’d come to America to do music and felt like I’d slammed into a wall, another opportunity was about to present itself.
Between 2011 and 2014, I’d been traveling back and forth between India and America constantly. As soon as that period began, Anjula and I, in light of my busy film career at home, started to have conversations about my getting representation for acting here in the States, too. “Who knows?” Jimmy added. “At some point that might become part of your career here alongside your music.” It was a moment when we were starting to see more much-needed female diversity on prime-time television. On ABC alone there was Sofia Vergara on Modern Family, Kerry Washington on Scandal, and Sandra Oh on Grey’s Anatomy, so in that regard, the timing seemed good. In 2012, I signed with Creative Artists Agency; the headline in The Hollywood Reporter would later read: “CAA Signs Its First Bollywood Star.” Given that my name wasn’t in the headline, I almost felt like I was representing the industry I’d come from more than myself.
The music and TV/film businesses are so connected that at every music party or event I attended I was bound to meet not only musicians and music producers but actors, casting directors, and film producers, too. It was no surprise, then, that in 2012 while I was working on my album, I happened to find myself at a small dinner party where Keli Lee, then vice president of casting for ABC, was a guest, too.
“America is going through a golden age of television,” Keli told me as we sipped our adult beverages. “All of the great writing is on TV these days.” We talked a little more about what ABC was doing as a network with its groundbreaking TV shows—and then she asked me what I thought about trying television in the States.
Episodic television series are long commitments compared to movies—if successful, a series commitment can last for years—so I had a conversation with Anjula and Natasha to discuss the pros and c
ons. One of the pros was that just as Keli had said, the quality of writing on American TV was terrific, and television had once again become a highly desirable medium to work in; chances were that if I took on a role in a series, I’d have a really meaty part to chew on. There didn’t seem to be any cons, except in terms of long-term commitment.
“It’s not like she’s giving you a show that you have to commit to right now, Pri,” Anjula reminded me. “She’s talking about signing a talent deal, an opportunity to possibly do a show.” I had a real concern that if I took a role in an American series I’d lose momentum in my Hindi film career because of the time commitment—but what could be the harm in just exploring an opportunity?
So Keli eventually flew to India, visited me in Mumbai on the set of the action thriller Gunday, and pitched me on doing a talent deal with ABC. The idea was that I would visit Los Angeles for two months during pilot season—traditionally the months between January and April when networks decide what new programming they’re going to green-light for the upcoming season—and read through all the scripts ABC thought were right for me. Then I’d audition for the ones I was interested in, with no guarantee that I’d be cast. Keli convinced us of the power of American television to propel me straight into American pop culture if a good fit was found for me. The gamble was irresistible; my music had not borne the fruit that I wanted it to in the States, and this was another opportunity to consolidate my position in entertainment in a different country. And that’s how I found myself on a flight to Tinseltown to explore doing episodic TV.
I spent two months in early 2015 reading a two-foot-high stack of scripts—twenty-six of them, to be exact—that the studio thought would be good for me. Keli recommended her three favorites, and it turned out that they were the exact same scripts I had chosen as my favorites, with Quantico at the top of both our lists.
Just because a studio is considering a script, though, doesn’t mean it will necessarily be made into a pilot, which is a single episode intended to test the waters before the commitment to shoot a whole season is made. As it turns out, of the three scripts, only Quantico was chosen to be shot as a pilot; ultimately it was picked up for a full season—not all pilots are—and two additional seasons after that. Thank God we’d picked a viable script or I’d have been out of luck. It seemed like a Hollywood dream come true.
But this dream hadn’t just fallen into my lap, it was the result of a ton of pavement pounding. By this time I’d been focusing on film and television in the U.S. for almost a year, and Anjula was managing me. Anjula had founded a successful online entertainment platform and was a venture capitalist, but she’d had no experience in managing someone’s career. Dana Supnick-Guidoni had come on board as my publicist more than a year and a half earlier, while I was still trying to make a success of my music career, and while she had deep experience as a publicist for beauty brands, she had never represented an individual. Having done around fifty films in India, some of which received great critical acclaim, some of which were blowout successes, I was well known to the global community of Hindi film viewers, but as we’ve established, few people outside of that viewership knew me in the United States. So we had an unknown manager and an unknown publicist representing an unknown actor. We called ourselves the Three Blind Mice, because we were hustling and figuring things out on the fly, feeling our way through things.
Dana had been able to arrange the Wall Street Journal interview in 2014 and a few articles in Variety, but we didn’t get much else. Once I signed Quantico, we thought it would be easier to get print coverage, but we were wrong. Having received so much of it in my home country, this was a lot to wrap my brain around. It was my new reality, though, so I put my head down and just kept working. Finally, finally after Quantico had established itself as a hit, I got my first magazine cover with Elle in February of 2016, and in time others followed.
I’ve gotten ahead of myself, though. Back in the late winter/early spring of 2015, I’d picked Quantico as my first choice of the scripts that ABC showed me, but that didn’t mean that the lead role of Alex Parrish, a young FBI recruit training to become a special agent, was mine. I still had to audition for it.
No big deal, right? After all, I’d done some fifty Hindi films by that point. But my audition for the role of Alex Parrish was the first real audition I’d had to do in over a decade. Because in India I’d gone from being Miss World to working in movies almost immediately, I didn’t have that difficult period of auditioning repeatedly in order to find work. Once you’re established there, like in the States, too, you often get straight offers. So now a simple audition scared the hell out of me. A dialect coach helped me prepare by working with me on getting my American accent right for the audition tape—and here I’d spent all that time working with Sabira Merchant getting rid of my “Yankee-sounding accent.” Ha! Since Alex Parrish was an American girl, born and raised in Oakland, California, I wanted my speech to reflect that. Once I felt I was ready, Anjula, acting simultaneously as cameraperson and the off-camera scene partner reading opposite me, taped the audition.
The tape passed muster, which meant it was time for an in-person audition. I showed up at the studio to find two other contenders for the role running their lines in the hall as they waited; they looked poised, confident, and beautiful. It was the Ashoka Hotel and the London airport all over again, where I’d felt insecure in the face of competition that looked like it belonged, that looked like it had been in this situation before and knew exactly what to do. I slipped into the ladies’ room and said a little prayer of thanks when I found it empty.
I took a breath, gripped the edges of the sink in front of me, and met my own eyes in the mirror. “Priyanka Chopra,” I said, as if I were my mother trying to talk some sense into me, “what are you afraid of? You know exactly what you’re doing. You can’t even keep track of the number of movies you’ve starred in, that’s how prepared and ready you are. Just go in there and do your work.”
I’m happy to report that sometimes those pep talks we give ourselves actually do work. Or maybe it was hearing my mother being channeled through me. By the time I entered the audition room, I was relaxed again and confident in my preparation. I felt something when I walked into the room, a heightened quality of attention I couldn’t really put my finger on. I did the scene, was happy with the way it went, and everyone was really nice. Two days later I got a phone call that I’d gotten the job. Sometime after that, Josh Safran, the show’s creator, said in an interview, “When Priyanka walked into the audition, the molecules shifted…and we all sat up straighter in our chairs.”
Maybe that’s what I’d felt, the molecules shifting, people sitting up straighter in their chairs. Whatever it was, I sensed that everyone in the room was alert and paying close attention. Which was a great atmosphere in which to just go ahead and act the hell out of the scene.
Alex Parrish hadn’t been written as having a particular ethnicity, but once I got the part, the writers decided to alter her background to make it authentic to me. They added in the fact that she was biracial—her mother was Indian and her father a white American—and decided that while Alex would be a thoroughly American young woman, born and raised here, she’d also be in touch with her Indian roots. I did a couple of scenes where I spoke some Hindi, and there were references to me having backpacked through India. Maybe most meaningful to me was the fact that I wore a bracelet with the “om” symbol on it, and the first shot of me in Episode 1, Season 1, is a close-up not of my face but of that om bracelet encircling my wrist. When I’d suggested the bracelet to Sami Rattner, the show’s stylist, I had no idea it would mean so much to me, but that clear, simple reflection of my culture felt so personal at the time that even now I get goosebumps whenever I see the shot. The bracelet remained around Alex’s wrist for all three seasons, reminding Alex and viewers of her heritage in a subtle yet concrete way. I know it’s a small thing, but it felt like a big win to
me.
My strategy for entering the American TV and film world was to initially play roles where my ethnicity did not define the character or drive the action; unfortunately, at the time, it seemed to me that once South Asian characters played ethnicity-defined roles, they often got stereotyped into a box, and I didn’t want to fall prey to that Hollywood standard. I wanted to be able to play not only parts that required me to be Indian but also those that came from a larger pool of options where my origins didn’t define my character or the story.
It felt like a big deal then, a huge deal, that I’d been cast as Alex Parrish. As the first South Asian ever to play the lead character on a network show (Kerry Washington became the first African American woman to lead a network drama in forty years with Scandal in 2012, which was a giant step in the right direction), I felt such a sense of achievement, and gratitude, too. But I also felt a lot of pressure. I was proud that I’d been cast in the role, but I worried that if the show didn’t do well, it would be a step back for South Asian actors in general, and the weight of that burden—self-imposed, I know—felt enormous.
Fortunately, the weight was alleviated somewhat because the show was a success. I absolutely loved Alex Parrish. She was bold, brazen, and unapologetically flawed. Alex never felt the need to explain her behavior, which was a trait we shared. One of my favorite scenes, which kept the Internet busy for a few days, was in the first episode, where Alex has sex with a stranger in the backseat of a car at the airport. When they meet again, he pretends he doesn’t know her, and she won’t have it. “We had sex in your car six hours ago,” she says to him in front of a group of new recruits, calling him out in front of everyone. That, to me, was the power of Alex. No one scared her. Her freedom and audacity made me itch to get my hands on the scripts for every episode.
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