It should come as no surprise that many consider Priyanka Chopra to be one of the most beautiful women in the world, especially given that she won Miss World in 2000.
However, it seems like Hollywood thought otherwise.
Revealed in an excerpt of Chopra‘s memoir, Unfinished, the Quantico star spoke candidly about a certain director-producer who exhibited extreme sexist behaviour and her own manager who supported their request.
“After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him,” Chopra described in the book, as per Metro. “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.”
She continued, “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.”
Chopra was clearly let down, not only by the industry, but by those who should have been looking out for her—their compliance proves that there is clearly significant work that still needs to be done regarding sexism in Hollywood. Sadly, the 38-year-old actor told Metro that this type of behaviour is still wrongfully “normalised” in the industry.
“It’s so normalised that it doesn’t come up in conversation,” she said. “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.”
Continuing, she said: “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 normalised thing that girls hear so often.”
Chopra went on to note that the added presence of women behind the camera, rather than in front, is helping to change the industry slowly but surely.
“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, ‘Alright, 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,’” she explained.
“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.”
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