After the highly controversial interview with the ex-Royal couple Prince Harry and Megan Markle, Oprah Winfrey has again served us a shocking interview with global sensation Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
Along with various other things, Priyanka Chopra opened up about how she was mistreated by a filmmaker in her early days of Bollywood.
Mistreatment by filmmaker
During her interview, Priyanka Chopra revealed that she was asked to strip down to her underwear on the sets of a film, for a ‘sultry’ dance number. She admitted that despite quitting the movie the next day, she still regrets not standing up for herself.
“My regret with that incident is that I never said anything to that filmmaker. I was so scared. I was new in the entertainment business and girls are always told that ‘you don’t want to get a reputation of being hard to work with.’ So, I worked within the system. And that’s my regret is that I never stood up to him and said, ‘What you did was wrong because I was scared but the only way, I knew how to deal with it was just to step away from it and have grace under fire. And that’s what I did,” she told Oprah.
“My mom told me when I was nine years old, ‘Whatever you do in your life, you will be financially independent.’ I was told to have an opinion in a room that disagreed with me. I was always encouraged to have a voice. My regret with that incident is that I never said anything to that filmmaker. I was so scared. I was new in the entertainment business and girls are always told that ‘you don’t want to get a reputation of being hard to work with.’ So, I worked within the system. And that’s my regret is that I never stood up to him and said, ‘What you did was wrong’ because I was scared but the only way, I knew how to deal with it was just to step away from it and have grace under fire. And that’s what I did,” she further added.
Priyanka also opened about being racially bullied in her high school
The actress revealed that she was bullied in high school for being a girl of brown colour when she was just 16 years old. Priyanka was 13 when she flew to America to live with her aunt and naturally had to spend her teenage years at American high schools.
Talking to Oprah Winfrey about how the bullying affected her in her teenage years, Priyanka Chopra said, “I think high school is hard anywhere, right? And to be coming of age, to understand your body as a woman and at the same time, to be devalued for something I can’t change or you know, I wasn’t even aware of the fact that this was something I should feel embarrassed about. But I guess when I was made to feel like, did my clothes smelled funny when I walked by hallway or did people smell curry or little things like that at 16 are so detrimental to a sense of self-worth, your sense of self. It’s just about being mean, trying to hurt someone.”
Priyanka recalled that she had to call her mom and ask her to take her back to India. “In retrospect now, I think that they probably didn’t know what they were really doing, it was just trying to hurt somebody. But at that time, at 16, I remember I was like, ‘I don’t wanna live in this country.’ I called my mom, she came over and we went back home,” Priyanka told Winfrey.
