Actress, Priyanka Chopra had recalled the ‘dehumanizing moment’ a film director put her in an uncomfortable situation on set.
The 40 year old actress revealed that an unnamed Bollywood filmmaker had asked to see her underwear during the early years of her acting career.
‘This may have been 2002 or 2003,’ she said during an interview with The Zoe Report.
‘I’m undercover, I’m seducing the guy — obviously that’s what girls do when they’re undercover. But I’m seducing the guy and you have to take off one piece of clothing [at a time],’ she recalled.
‘I wanted to layer up [but] the filmmaker was like, “No, I need to see her underwear. Otherwise, why is anybody coming to watch this movie?’”
‘He didn’t say it to me,’ Chopra went on.
‘He said it to the stylist in front of me. It was such a dehumanizing moment. It was a feeling of, “I’m nothing else outside of how I can be used, my art is not important, what I contribute is not important.’”
Chopra said the ordeal prompted her to quit the project two days later, but said she paid the production crew out of pocket for the money they’d lost after her father urged her to do so.
‘I just couldn’t look at [the director] every day,’ she added.
In March, Chopra also revealed the details of the main reason she left Bollywood.
‘I had people not casting me, I had beef with people, I am not good at playing that game so I kind of was tired of the politics and I said I needed a break,’ she said on Dax Shepherd’s ‘Armchair Expert’ podcast in March.
It was soon after that, she kick-started her short-lived music career, which eventually got her into Hollywood.
‘This music thing gave me an opportunity to go into another part of the world, not crave for the movies I didn’t want to get but I would require to schmooze certain clubs and cliques of people,’ she explained.
‘It would require groveling and I had worked a long time by then that I didn’t feel like I wanted to do it.
‘So when this music thing came I was like ‘f–k it I am going to America,’ she added.