Bollywood can wait. Priyanka Chopra shows no signs of returning. The actress who was last seen on the Hindi screen in Prakash Jha’s Jai Gangaajal in March 2016, is back in chilly New York and shooting for Quantico Season 3. This morning she announced her return to the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) Studios’ TV thriller series on the FBI with a post on Instagram that said, “And I’m back… 3 am landings… 6 am shoots… a story in the life of me.” The show premieres on April 26.
Since she signed on the series in September 2015, Priyanka did only Bajirao Mastani and Jai Gangaajal with Bollywood. There was talk last year that she was looking at signing a few interesting projects when she came down for Christmas. One of them was reportedly Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s ambitious biopic Gustakhiyan on the poetess and writer Amrita Pritam and her relationship with lyricist and poet Sahir Ludhianvi in which Priyanka was said to be keen to play the title role. But, when she came down, Priyanka got swept in a whirl of social activity and Bhansali was immersed in his problems with Padmavati.
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The actress then went to London for the New Year and is now back in NY and shooting for Quantico Season 3. She hung out with the co-stars Jake McLaughlin, Russell Tovey and Alan Powell in between shots and that too made Instagram with Priyanka saying, “Three dudes and a chick walk into a bar… we lunched… we laughed… we went back to work.” Bollywood’s loss is American TV’s gain. Welcome back, Alex Parrish. The actress’ fan following crossed gazillions because of this character and she left a global footprint as the name and face of the American TV show.
The story goes that Priyanka told ABC in 2015 she would do Quantico only if she saw her face on billboards. She made it clear that she was no small actor and was used to seeing her face on Bollywood posters. “Why not?” she asked in an interview, “There was no precedent to it. Has there been an Indian actor in the lead before in any American film or TV show? Not that I can remember. Was Kabir Bedi the lead in Octopussy, the James Bond film of 1983? He wasn’t even the lead villain. So I was wondering, I was not sure how the world would react to an Indian actor playing the lead and carrying the show. I was very nervous at that time.”
The American terrorism thriller TV series got Priyanka’s name in lights across the US. “I didn’t see that coming,” she admitted. “The show, in just one season, went to 56 countries. It was awesome to see the reception I got. I went to obscure countries, well – not obscure, but countries where I didn’t expect anyone to know about me or my show, and found people of different races and nationalities familiar with the work I’ve done in Quantico, countries like Japan, France, where it was the No. 1 show, Germany, China, where they had my face on buses, it was so cool to see that kind of reception.”
