Priyanka Chopra has to be India’s most celebrated import to the western world since yoga. Everyone wants a piece of her. One day she is busy eating buffalo wings with Jimmy Fallon, the next she is rubbing shoulders with Liev Schreiber at the Oscars. The world is discovering our good ol PeeCee, and they want to know what she eats for breakfast, what brand of shampoo she uses, what’s her driver’s name and, of course, who she is dating. In a recent interview with Refinery29, Priyanka Chopra obliges. Well, kind of. Like most responsible female role models around the world, she talks in length about feminism and racism. Then there is the juicier bit, the part where she talks about her “complicated” relationship.
Here are few excerpts from the interview:
“If I walk out on the streets and there are paparazzi taking my picture, I’m not hypocritical enough to turn around and say, ‘Don’t take my picture, It’s their job to do it. I feel like 90% of my life is an open book.’I live my life for the world’. Those lines are very clear for me. When I step out of the house and I go to work, I’m someone else. When I finish work and come back, then I’m me.”
“I feel like something should be mine, so I protect myself, Not that I have not been in relationships. I have very much. Right now, I guess I’m in a place where it’s complicated.”
Priyanka Chopra also talks about the responsibility of playing a South Asian role model in a network thriller:
“I know everything is about diversity right now. But I think it should be about humanity. It’s 2016. It’s so easy to separate ourselves and become smaller and smaller pieces of humanity,” she says. “I don’t like the phrase ‘woman of color.’ I feel like that puts women in a box. I’m a woman, whether I’m white, Black, brown, green, blue, or pink — whatever. I think we need to start looking beyond that. It would be a big win for women, period.”
“I’m a really tough girl,I’m really good at fixing things and dealing with things. When the big shit hits the fan: I’m the one who’ll stand up and say, ‘Alright, this is the solution. We can do this. This is fixable.’ But I couldn’t do that with my dad.”
She also talks about her idea of beauty:
“I didn’t even know I was beautiful until — I don’t even know it now, I don’t think I was the most beautiful girl in the world. I think I won because I was well spoken and I was decently turned out. The stars aligned that day. But I taught myself to be the best version of myself over the years.”
“Beauty is so subjective, whether it’s art, whether it’s human beings, whether it’s nature. What is one person’s ‘Mona Lisa’ is not someone else’s, you know?”
“Beauty has nothing to do with me,” she says. “I was born with it. But I don’t want to be known by the fact that I’m beautiful. I want to be known for the fact that I’m an achiever. Not even an actor. I don’t want a label. I don’t want a box. I want a legacy.”
