‘Confidence is a muscle you need to work on’
Priyanka Chopra Jonas talks insecurity, controversy and her new tell-all book
IN THE FIRST week of January, global superstar Priyanka Chopra Jonas was photographed leaving a salon in Notting Hill. The resulting news stories caused a small furore as the public added her to their list of supposedly out-of-touch celebrities – Kim Kardashian, Rita Ora, Dua Lipa – who were flouting lockdown. Tensions were high, but today Priyanka is defiant, and insists that she was there for work. ‘I just wish that people would actually write the facts,’ she tells Grazia, reiterating that the hair appointment was required for a role she is currently filming, and that the police who attended the scene found that no laws were broken. ‘Everyone is sitting at home watching film and TV, but someone has got to make it,’ she points out. ‘The Government allows for filming and that’s why I’m here for a year, filming two different projects. I was just doing my job. I don’t know how else to explain that.’
Priyanka – who has recently earned rave reviews for her performance in Netflix drama The White Tiger – is speaking to Grazia via video call from her west London base. She is glamorous: hair sleek, make-up perfect. But out of shot, she says, she’s wearing sweatpants. And while lockdown may have thrust her into tricky situations, it has also provided silver linings. Priyanka had pledged to write a memoir but hadn’t found the time. ‘Cut to two years later and my publisher was saying, “We’re going to need some pages,”’ she says. ‘Then the pandemic happened. I was home for six months. It was a vulnerable time in the world, and also personally: I’ve been running at such a fast speed for 20 years, project to project. You constantly have to be hustling. And this just gave me a pause: I really peeled off the layers. The book was almost healing, you know?’
While 38-year-old Priyanka’s name has been making a lot of headlines here in recent years thanks to her Hollywood career – and her wedding to singer Nick Jonas, 28, in 2018 – she’s been in the public eye since the age of 17, when she took part in the Miss World pageant. Her book, Unfinished, explores her journey to that point. After a childhood in India, as the daughter of two military doctors moving from place to place, a new life in the US began for her as a teen, until her return to India, where a Miss World application sent by her younger brother – ‘he wanted his room back’ – saw Priyanka whisked away to London, going on to reach the competition’s final.
‘It was a crazy jump,’ she says of the pageant process. ‘I was kind of thrown into the deep end, and all I knew was that I was going to swim. I don’t think I realised that billions of people were watching. I could only be sure of what was happening in the moment: “I’m wearing this gown, I have to go on stage and Jerry Springer is going to ask me a question.” I was taking it as it came.’ The question posed by the TV host provided Priyanka with her first controversy: asked to describe a living woman who she admired, she named Mother Teresa, who had died three years previously. She took the crown regardless. An overnight sensation, she used the publicity as a springboard into a career in Bollywood, then Hollywood – and she always says what she thinks. ‘My parents encouraged me, even provoked me, into having an opinion, especially when the room didn’t agree,’ she says. ‘I was always hanging out with my parents and their friends. I was never shunned in my room or hidden. If I asked a question, it was answered – I was never told, “Because I said so.” That gave me a sense of fearlessness.
I still have my insecurities. Everybody has. But I have the equipment to be able to handle that a little better.’
The book addresses Priyanka’s experiences with bullying and body-image issues. ‘I was not always this confident person,’ she explains. ‘Confidence is a tool we’ve all been given. It’s like a muscle, you need to work on, build on and take it out when you need it.’
She spent Valentine’s Day away from Nick, but he sent what Priyanka referred to jokingly as ‘just a couple of roses’. Her Instagram post on the day showed her surrounded by what looks like hundreds of them. Priyanka describes his charming approach to wooing her in the book. But is it always like this? ‘Not at all,’ she laughs. ‘Of course not. It’s normal. And normal love is the best love: it’s not big. It doesn’t need anything. To be able to sit for hours and have conversations with each other? That’s romantic.’
‘Unfinished’ (£20, Michael Joseph) is out now