The colour bias continues to thrive in Hollywood and Priyanka Chopra has spoken out about how she lost a film role in Hollywood because of the colour of her skin. In the course of an interview with an international magazine, InStyle, a clearly hurt Priyanka opened up about the episode that occurred in 2017. “It happened last year. I was out for a movie, and somebody (from a studio) called one of my agents and said, ‘She’s the wrong—what word did they use?—‘physicality.’ So in my defence as an actor, I’m like, ‘Do I need to be skinnier? Do I need to get in shape? Do I need to have abs?’ Like, what does ‘wrong physicality’ mean?
“And then my agent broke it down for me. Like, ‘I think, Priy, they meant that they wanted someone who’s not brown.’ It affected me,” said the actress, who has made a name for herself with ‘Quantico’ and will next be seen in A Kid Like Jake alongside Jim Parsons and Octavia Spencer.
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Priyanka maintained that the statistics tell the true story. “No one will say that a woman is getting paid less because she’s a woman of colour, but the numbers mostly end up reflecting that.”
She also spoke out about the gender wage gap that continues to exist between men and women in the film industry. Revealing that she has dealt with pay inequality against women in both Bollywood and Hollywood, she shared, “I feel it every year, especially when you’re doing movies with really big actors, whether it’s in India or America. If an actor is getting 100 bucks, the conversation will start with max, like, 8 bucks. The gap is that staggering.”
She added, “In America, we don’t talk about it as brashly, whereas in India the issue is not skirted around. I’ve been told straight up, if it’s a female role in a movie with big, male actors attached, your worth is not really considered as much.”
Reasoning that “People don’t go watch females in movies because they don’t believe that they can be heroes,” she believes it is time for the world to change the way they look at their heroes. “Specifically how men can help is changing the ‘locker-room talk’ conversation. Nothing will change until we break the stereotypes of gender in our normal, day-to-day life,” she maintained.
A UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, this former Miss World believes we are on the break of a transformation as women are literally seeing through the farce. “We’ve been taught for eons that women need to fight each other, clamber and climb on top of each other to get that one job. And, now we’re seeing through it.” Makes you proud, doesn’t she?
