‘Baywatch’ babes

THE LADIES OF Baywatch are making a major splash in the reboot of the cult-classic TV show.

Indian actress Priyanka Chopra makes her American film debut as the no-nonsense villain Victoria Leeds, a drug ring leader out to take over all the small beach businesses to help fuel her own. The role was originally written for a man.

“We are in 2017, villains don’t just have to be boys,” Chopra told the Daily News of the modern take on the summer blockbuster, which comes out May 25.

Chopra, 34, fights Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson’s good-guy character Mitch Buchannon, made famous by David Hasselhoff, who is out to stop her from corrupting the bay with a little help from his fleet of lifeguards — Zac Efron, Kelly Rohrbach, Jon Bass, Alexandra Daddario and Ilfenesh Hadera.

You won’t see Chopra parading around in a red swimsuit — although plenty of the ladies in the film certainly wear them well.

“I think what our producers and director (Seth Gordon) thought … is that it would be very new for a woman to play the villain against The Rock. Not too many women can say they’ve taken on The Rock and are alive to tell the story, and I got to do that and it was great.”

Her character also subtly addresses sexism.

“If I was a man, you’d call me driven,” she says in one scene, referencing her shady business acumen.

Still (spoiler alert!), her unethical practices eventually lead to her downfall in the film.

Chopra grew up watching the TV show — which aired from 1989 to 2001, starring Hasselhoff and Pamela Anderson as the original leads — when she was a kid in India with her mom. It gave her a warped perspective of what Americans looked like.

“I thought everyone was blonde and everyone had beaches and people just hung out on the beach — it was like eternal vacation,” Chopra said. “And then I landed in New York at 12 and it didn’t look like ‘Baywatch’ — or ‘90210’ for that matter.”

Chopra, who sports fashionable outfits like a cleavage-baring,