Indian Summer

To achieve success in the States, actress and producer PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS felt she had to downplay her South Asian heritage. Now, in love and inspired, she’s embracing it.

- Nandini D'souza Wolfe

Over breakfast in New York one fine spring morning, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, the 37-year-old actress, and producer who has successfully crossed over from Bollywood to Hollywood, is serving up a side of existential optimism while eating her avocado toast. “Obviously, the purpose in life is to be happy,” she says, her bedazzling Chopard wedding band from her husband, American heartthrob Nick Jonas, managing to sparkle even though we’re sitting far from the window. Perhaps it’s catching the light from her hard-to-miss newlywed glow. “Nobody put you on this earth to feel like shit. I think the point of existence is to make the journey the best that you can. Create your own circumstances.”

She knows whereof she speaks. Crowned Miss India and Miss World in 2000, she then pivoted to become an actress, eventually appearing in more than 50 Bollywood films. While the typical Indian heroines were pristine and perfect, Chopra Jonas opted for roles that were complicated and deliberately abstract. It was her way of testing her ability and setting herself apart from some of her predecessors, like Aishwarya Rai, a Miss World–turned–Bollywood actress who attempted to cross over but with little success. Chopra Jonas’s choices paid off—among her many accolades was a National Film Award (India’s version of the Oscars) in 2008 for her role in Fashion as a supermodel who gets pregnant. She also played a disabled girl in Barfi! and a legendary champion boxer in the biopic Mary Kom. Versatility has proved to be Chopra Jonas’s strong suit, even if it means falling short once in a while.

“I like learning, and I’m not so afraid of failure that I won’t attempt something,” she says. “If you fail, which I have many times, and make risky choices, you just dust yourself off, get up, and try something else. It’s not the beginning of the end of everything.”