GLOBAL DOMINATION

PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS SPEAKS TO RACHIT GUPTA ON RETURNING TO INDIAN CINEMA, BUILDING A CROSS-CONTINENTAL CREATIVE EMPIRE, AND THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND HER STORYTELLING.

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PRIYANKA CHOPRA JONAS HAS NEVER LIVED LIFE IN SINGULAR LANES.

Her career, her choices, her geography, even her identity are plural, expansive, and in constant motion. Her electric return to Indian cinema comes with SS Rajamouli and Mahesh Babu’s Varanasi, which aptly had a working title ‘Globe Trotter’ until a few weeks ago. It marks not just a homecoming, but a convergence of India’s most audacious filmmaker joining hands with one of its most fearless global ambassadors. After years spent forging an international acting career with TV, studio tentpoles, streaming blockbusters, and nurturing a production footprint across continents, Priyanka now finds herself filming in Hyderabad, flying to Los Angeles between schedules, dipping in and out of Mumbai, and raising her daughter Malti Marie Chopra Jonas in the middle of all this beautifully chaotic movement. She laughs easily about the pace, but the truth is, “this is the very life she has built, brick by intentional brick.”

For Priyanka, growth has never been cosmetic. Reinvention has never been a performance. And evolution has never been accidental. It has always been necessity, curiosity, and the instinctive desire to widen the frame, not just for herself, but for the kinds of stories she believes should exist in the world. Which is why when she heard Chef Sash Simpson’s story, she didn’t simply listen. She broke down.

A STORY THAT UNDID HER

Born on the streets of Chennai, abandoned as a child, raised in an orphanage, adopted into Canada, and now one of the world’s celebrated culinary names, Sash Simpson’s life is structured like fiction but anchored in staggering truth. For Priyanka, it was impossible to engage with it clinically. “I was a mess. I was in tears, and it took me an hour or two to come to terms with the story and Sash’s incredible life, his resilience, his tenacity. It really moved me,” she recalls.