Priyanka Chopra on challenges of portraying champion boxer
Priyanka Chopra is not a Bollywood actor who waits around for assistants to mic her up, set a TV camera’s white balance and tell her where to look during an interview.
When I met her on Tuesday at a posh hotel in Gurgaon, she used the paper I brought with my questions on it for the white balance, told the assistant how and where to set up the mic and opened a bottle of cough syrup, sparing the poor staffer who was struggling with it for her.
“I can get things done,” she said. Indeed, the latest evidence that the 32-year- old superstar is telling the truth is her portrayal of Mary Kom, the Olympic medallist and five-time World Amateur Boxing champion who comes from the far-flung state of Manipur in India’s northeast, an area that is far away from the heart of the country and home to many of its ethnic minorities.
The decision to cast Chopra in the role of Kom has led to accusations that the fi lm’s producers preferred to go with a bankable star rather than another actor from Manipur or elsewhere in the northeast, and has prompted a new round of discussion about the nation’s marginalising of people from this region. Chopra discussed this and other aspects of playing Kom in our interview.
Q. How do you portray a real, living person? Are you left with any creative licence?
A. Of course you can’t imitate or mimic someone … I spent a lot of time with her. I got to know her, and the character that I play is my projection of what I have understood as Mary Kom. I don’t know how right or wrong it is, but according to me it’s the closest I could be to what her personality is.
Q. Wasn’t this movie challenging? On a physical level as well as others?
A. It was very, very challenging at many levels, you are right. But I like things that push me. It’s a fi lm that I know, if I go wrong, then it would be really hard on me because I have put two years of my life into this. But fi ngers crossed, all that I had has gone into this movie as a creative person.
Q. You visited Mary Kom at her home in Manipur. What did you think about the northeast – the general perception is it is cut off, people feel alienated there, it is neglected, etc.
A. People are very angry in Manipur with India as such. I hope this fi lm helps them feel a part of the country that they are. We are rightfully theirs. I have been to a lot of northeast, a lot of my family is in the army so we keep getting posted there. There is a lot of anger, there is a feeling of being alienated, of not being a part of India. I hope with, fi rst of all, me as a north Indian person doing this fi lm and representing Manipur, and second of all, the fact that this fi lm is being made for a pan-India Hindi audience, so the northeast I hope gets a lot more attention and light because it has provided so many champions for India and we don’t know about them.
Q. What do you make of the entire controversy about not having an actor from the northeast play Mary Kom?
A. That was really not up to me. I think there was a whole debate on casting a new person, an actor from the northeast. But the budget of the fi lm became really small because unfortunately, among the top few actors, there is nobody who is northeastern. I was told that we needed a commercia l ly viable actor to play it, and I was really happy that I was picked. — Reuters