Priyanka Chopra Jonas is speaking out about the moment a film director told her she should “fix” certain parts of herself.
The actress gets candid about incidents in her life throughout her new book Unfinished, admitting she’d been told to have plastic surgery after winning Miss World in 2000.
The 38-year-old wrote in her book, according to Metro.co.uk, “After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him. I did. He stared at me long and hard, assessing me, and then suggested that I get a boob job, fix my jaw, and add a little more cushioning to my butt. If I wanted to be an actress, he said, I’d need to have my proportions ‘fixed,’ and he knew a great doctor in L.A. he could send me to. My then-manager voiced his agreement with the assessment.
“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.”
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Chopra Jonas eschewed the advice and parted ways with her then-manager soon after.
The star told Metro, “It’s so normalized that it doesn’t come up in conversation. I talked about a movie that I walked out of because of how I was spoken to by the director. It was early in my career, but I never told him why I walked out.
“I never had the courage to stand up for myself, and actually admit it. Because I heard so often, ‘Don’t be a nuisance, you’re new in the industry, you don’t want to have a reputation that you cause trouble or you’re not easy to work with.’ Now on the other side of 35, I know that’s a normalized thing that girls hear so often.
“I fell for it too, even though I consider myself a forward-thinking, smart girl. I learned from that over time, but at that time, I was terrified. Yes, I faced that then, I faced that like everybody else when you’re in patriarchal industries, which ours has been for a very long time.”
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Chopra Jonas shone a spotlight on a special time in the showbiz industry, saying: “I’ve mentioned a bunch of female producers in the book that I really admire, who’ve taken charge of their own lives and said, ‘All right, you’re not going to make a part for me or the movie that I want to be in, I’m going to produce it myself.’
“We see so many women that have banded together to be able to do it ourselves and [are] taking back our power. Now we’re seeing, we are that generation that is hopefully going to see women in leadership roles, that is going to see women in roles of power, so that the next generation that comes after us doesn’t have to inherit these issues.
“That’s our job. We need to take that seriously and we can only do that ourselves by being an example of what a possibility could be.
“If I had seen somebody else on TV, kicking a**… The show I did, ‘Quantico’, I was the first South Asian to ever [front] a network TV show, in 2015. It was crazy to think about that. To me, if I had had that, maybe I wouldn’t have been so insecure in the hallways of my high school, or felt that I was so different.”
