Priyanka Chopra Is India’s Sweetheart

You should probably know who Priyanka Chopra is. Not because you’ve seen her face on billboards across whatever city you’re living in, promoting her new show Quantico. And not because that face is a mesmerizing amalgam of seductively oversized features (lips, eyes, dimples, etc.), which is to say totally unforgettable.

I hope the rest of the world finds me interesting enough to discover, too.

No, you should know who Priyanka Chopra is because she’s famous. Remarkably, almost ridiculously famous. Since winning the Miss World pageant in 2000, Chopra turned to acting (and, later, singing) and launched a career that’s been more-or-less unparalleled outside of a small cadre of global superstars: think J Lo, Madonna or Beyoncé.

Chopra is one of the most popular Bollywood actresses of this or any time. She’s one of the highest paid in the history of Indian film. She has roughly 11 million Twitter followers. She is, arguably, the most famous person known to a full 1/7th of the world’s population. To think that she’s only just breaking out to a mainstream North American audience is, frankly, a full-on travesty.

“I’m a discovery,” she says. “In India, audiences discovered me over time. I hope the rest of the world finds me interesting enough to discover, too.”

Interesting isn’t a problem for Chopra. Forget her looks, if you can, for just a second. Let’s start with what she’d be doing if she wasn’t acting and singing, straddling a superstar’s career across two very different continents: she’s pretty sure she’d be an aeronautical engineer. “When I was in high school, it seemed so fascinating to be able to build a bird,” she says. “Now I’m always on planes. They’re my second home. So in some strange way I still feel connected to them.”

Thing is, it’s not such a far-fetched idea. She even did a couple of years of math and engineering at university before being discovered as a literal beauty queen. “I hope to go back to school at some point,” she says. “I’m a geek at heart — it’s my Indian genes.” Those genes she’s talking about, well, they’re impressive. Her parents are both doctors (“overachievers,” she calls them), who encouraged her to pursue whatever interested her, whether that was building airplanes or building one of the most successful careers in the history of Indian pop culture.

And, if all goes according to plan, she’ll be busy building one of the most successful careers in worldwide pop culture. Full stop. Who has time to go back to school when world domination seems inevitable?

With Quantico, Chopra is poised to take on North America at its jugular: the enviable spotlight of the network television drama. In the show, which is filmed in Montreal, Chopra plays Alex Parrish, an FBI recruit who also happens to be suspected of masterminding a massive 9/11-style attack on New York City. In its press material, the show is described as “Grey’s Anatomy meets Homeland” — a suitably unsubtle bid for every conceivable eyeball in front of every conceivable North American TV set. That is to say, it’s a show that, much like its star, will be impossible to ignore.

Chopra is about to become famous all over again. No doubt she can handle it.

Photography by Brian Ypperciel

Styling by Florence O. Durand for Judy Inc. 

Hair by Julie St-Laurent at Next Canada

Make-up by Stephanie Brooke Barnes

Photo assisting by Nicolas Blais

Shot on location at the Epik Hotel Montreal