Priyanka Chopra On Her Blindling Stars and Downfall

Priyanka Chopra’s star is blinding as she takes on the globe and leads the pack at home. But it might also be her downfall, she tells Joseph Hooper.

- Joseph Hooper

It was miserable!” Priyanka Chopra announces in that should-be-trademarked Indian-Anglo– accented husky voice. “It was brutally cold and apparently winter’s not even here yet, but we braved it and did lots of pull-ups and push-ups in the rain.”

The “globalisation of popular culture” is a mouthful, and it’s a theme that has doubtless inspired a million high-minded essays. But know that its most perfect manifestation may be ABC’s Quantico, one of three breakout hits on American TV this season (along with Blindspot and Supergirl), which not incidentally features the ravishing 33-year-old Chopra as a driven FBI recruit going through basic training at the bureau’s academy in Quantico, Virginia — and which is filmed, for reasons of network economy, in chilly Montreal. Her character, we learn in an elaborate nine-month-later flash-forward sequence in the pilot, is also being framed for the inside-job bombing of Grand Central Station. The show is, to be sure, OTT: watch her character, Alex Parrish, kick ass in hand-to-hand combat, and bed the cute guy with whom she shares a dorm bathroom, and elude capture with a bag of hightech counterintelligence tricks, all in about five minutes’ worth of smallscreen jump cuts. But it’s intensely watchable, thanks to Chopra, who radiates megacharisma (the show’s “strongest human asset,” according to The New York Times