Priyanka Chopra: Pushing Boundries

It isn't easy to go from being a superstar in Bollywood to a rising star in American pop culture. But Priyanka Chopra is showing the world how it's done.

- Karishma Upadhyay

The year was 2000. Priyanka Chopra, all of 18, had just moved to Mumbai after becoming Miss India (World). Having won the Miss World title as well, she had stars in her eyes and her sights set firmly on becoming a superstar. She even told a close friend that some day she’d be the face on all the billboards along a well known stretch of Juhu Chowpatty.

Of course, that has happened multiple times during her 15-yearlong career in the Hindi film industry but even Chopra could not have never imagined that some day, her face would be plastered on virtually every taxi top, billboard, city bus and subway station from New York to San Francisco.

After having acted in over 50 Hindi films, in a major professional gearshift, Chopra is now a star on American television, having been cast as lead in ABC’s Quantico. In a show The New York Times (NYT) termed as ‘Homeland meets the Shonda Rhimes oeuvre’, she is front and centre of an ethnically varied cast as Alex Parrish, an FBI trainee accused of plotting the most devastating terrorist attack on New York since 9/11.

Parrish is half-Indian, has backpacked across India and Pakistan, and wears an Om bracelet. But her ethnicity is incidental, and Chopra wouldn’t have had it any other way. “When ABC approached me with the talent development deal, the only thing I told them was that I want to play an ethically ambiguous character. Alex could be from anywhere in the world,” the 33-year-old actress tells Forbes India on the phone from Montreal, Canada, where the show is being shot. There’s no Apu-esque (from The Simpsons) stereotyping, she points out. “Growing up, I loved watching