Priyanka Chopra says that after returning from America as a teenager “after all these American hormones,” she was “arrogant” and “vain,” which led to her father putting bars on her windows to get out of her paranoia.
Priyanka Chopra may have settled down as an adult, but she admits that maybe it was more than her father knew what to do when she was a young teen in India. The “Castle” star said she got so bad at one point her father put bars on the windows of her house.
According to Chopra, things changed after she spent four years in America, and returned at the age of 16. Like most teens, she then described herself as “arrogant, vain” and feeling “indomitable”.
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“My father was very paranoid that he had sent a 12-year-old with braids to America,” she told Stern of the late Ashok Chopra. “After all this American hormones and food, I’m back a little more woman than my dad would have expected at 16.”
She seemed to be feeling her transformation too, albeit in a very different way, telling Stern she was “a peacock like I was a peacock in my American high school.” And it worked, as she admitted the boys would follow her home.
“Somebody jumped onto my balcony at night,” she admitted, which prompted her father to make the drastic decision to put up bars. For clarity, this was not the boy she invited either.
Chopra recalled: “He was outside my balcony and I saw him and screamed and went to my dad. My dad came, jumped up and walked away.” “The next day my dad was like, ‘You need rules. “
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And so some were created. “My dad was like, ‘This, bars, all your jeans are confiscated, you’re going to wear Indian suits, nothing’s going on. ‘” I had a chauffeur drive me everywhere, he was afraid. “
After the balcony incident, she said, her father told her to “wear baggy clothes or Indian clothes,” which led to her borrowing his clothes, as she did not have any baggy clothes of her own. But she still finds ways to shine.
According to Chopra, she would pair his shirts with jeans, buttoned it open so that her style would become the talk of her small community. “I didn’t understand the seriousness of it,” she said. “I think about it now. How did I get away with this—which I did?”
Part of it, she said, was this shift in how her peers treated her. In America, she said she was bullied in high school. Back in India, though, “suddenly I had this credit.”
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During this time, Chopra won her first beauty pageant and went on to compete as Miss India and Miss World, which she won in 2000. Just two years later, she landed her first role in the 2002 romantic thriller, Humraaz, and the rest is history. .
Elsewhere in her conversation with Stern, Chopra spoke about the surgery accident that almost caused her entire career to collapse “before it even began.”
She described it as a “dark” time after she had surgery to remove a polyp in her nasal cavity which made her look very different. She soon began missing out on film roles, Chopra said, in InStyle, with three different projects being launched for her.
“This happened, and my face looked completely different, and I went into a deep, deep depression,” Chopra said. Fortunately, her father, who was also a doctor, agreed to hold her hand and be in the room with her during her corrective surgery.
She also credits Bollywood director Anil Sharma for helping her keep her spirits up, even though she was “turned into a supporting character” from a female lead in one of his projects. “He said, while the tide was against me, it would be a small part but give it your all. And I did.”
Today, Chopra is one of India’s most popular and successful actresses, who has expanded into music and even penned a best-selling memoir. Chopra married Nick Jonas in 2018; The two welcomed their daughter in January 2022.
You can hear her talk about “meet cute” in the clip below.
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