Priyanka Chopra Talks Quantico and Being Told “Girls Are Replaceable” for TIME
Actor and producer Priyanka Chopra is one of Time‘s 100 Most Influential People. In a video, she talks about being made fun of as a child, how the female-led 2008 film Fashion changed her, and the importance of representation in Quantico. Chopra, who was made fun of as a child, says, “I want to be known as someone who has goals and achieves them..I want to be Limitless.”
Chopra discusses psyching herself up for her Quantico audition by talking to a mirror, and the significance of a line her character, Alex Parrish, was given. In the Season 1 episode, “Found,” Alex says, “they framed the brown girl…In this country, I’
I remember when I read the line. I remember calling the writers and I said, ‘This is a really big deal. People in general, people who look like me, people who have been treated a certain way or racially profiled because of the color of their skin. Thank you for giving me that line.’
When was the last time you saw an FBI agent with a hijab? You know, when was the last time you saw an Indian girl who is the headline of a show and at the same time, completely insanely unapologetic, and bold and brazen, and not a doctor, a nerd, a computer scientist, or, you know, Apu from The Simpsons.
Her role on ABC’s Quantico made her the first South Asian woman to headline an American network series. She also shared an anecdote of when she first starting acting, where she was treated as replaceable on a film with a big actor when her dates weren’t working out:
When I was very young, I was 19 and I was doing the first few movies, I remember the producer said, ‘Well, she can’t work it out, it’s fine, we’ll just cast someone else. Girls are replaceable.” Subconsciously, it really worked on my mind, and I started picking up parts which were strong, which were not just the damsel in distress waiting for someone to rescue me. Now 13, 15 years later, whatever, I think that the movies that I do, I’m irreplaceable.
You can see her TIME 100 cover here and Dwayne Johnson, her friend and co-worker on Baywatch, wrote the Time article which you can read here.
(via Jezebel)
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