Friday, April 22, 2016
Housefull 3 poster: Akshay Kumar and the cast appear in shades of blues
What is Lisa Haydon’s 3-ingredient healthy juice recipe?
She’s got the perfect beach bod: tan skin, toned legs, flawless abs and wild (but smooth) hair—just like her personality—she doesn’t give in to inhibition and trends when it comes to her style. We caught up with the eloquent Indian-Australian star during a shoot with Pantene, and she let us in on her daily secrets:
Your style mantra: I like a mix of both high street and high glam. I think you can make high glam look cool like high street—just mix and match!
Your red carpet statement: I like to wear things that are chic but still a little bit punk rock. Anthony Vaccarello’s designs are my style.
Red lip or bold eyes: I have to go with red lips. But I’ll never do both together.
Your skincare regimen: I honestly believe in keeping things natural and basic. I don’t do too much to my skin. I always carry a face wash, Naked (by Lisa Haydon) moisturiser and a face oil. These work best for my skin. I drink tonnes of water. I’m actually allergic to a lot of sunscreens, so I avoid using a lot of it. I’ll protect my skin naturally by wearing a hat.
The three products that keep you going during a long day at shoot: My Kiehl’s lip balm, kohl and block powder.
On an off day: It depends on my mood, but I usually like to sleep in, exercise and see friends.
Your fitness routine: I work out every morning. I do yoga and Pilates five times a week. I’ve cut down long-distance running; I’m doing more of Pilates to tone up.
A smoothie you’re currently obsessed with: I have a spinach and kale juice every day with lemon.
Craving right now: Chocolates. Oh wait, Mad Over Donuts!
Your hair care routine: I keep telling my co-workers and friends a good shampoo and conditioner is all you need for great hair, all my sisters and I use Pantene.
Current favourite hairstyle: Has to be the fringe cut.
The most drastic hair experiment you ever tried: The first time I coloured my hair was for Housefull 3. It was blondish-brown. But a drastic haircut would be the one I got when I was 14 years old. I went to the salon with extremely long hair and I asked the lady to cut it to my shoulders. That’s the maximum amount of hair that was cut off at one shot.
Your style in three words: Happy, wild and free.
A theme song for your life: ‘The Happy Song’
The funniest thing you read/heard today: I read something really funny on Instagram shared by Atul Kasbekar. It reads, “For those who know nothing about how to satisfy women the G spot is located at the end of the word shopping.”
Favourite fashion destination: It’s hard to pick one. I would probably pick Australia because I find Australian fashion is most in line with my personality. What I like to wear is feminine, bohemian and a little sexy.
The words you use most often: “Love you”. I use that all the time.
On your bucket list: I’d like to go to Hawaii, but I am actually going there soon so that will be off my bucket list soon. I’d like to go to South America.
Your current favourite buy from your travels: I went on a ski trip recently and I bought myself a very nice D&G knitted sweater. It sounds like a granny thing but it’s really funky and cool. I like it.
Favourite Instagram filter: I like Valencia because it looks most natural. For when I want to go shamelessly glossy I use Rise.
Priyanka Chopra: “I make sure I’m the best person for the job”
A constellation of Hollywood stars sparkled across Los Angeles’s storied Dolby Theatre, making their way to the 88th Academy Awards this February, but my eyes stayed glued to a beguiling Indian import as she sailed into view. In her sheer ivory Zuhair Murad gown and 50-carat diamonds, a winning combo that’s earned her a coveted spot on various best-dressed lists, actor Priyanka Chopra, slated to present an award that evening, fielded a dizzying range of red-carpet queries. On several occasions, she made sure to mention that she’d work the after-party circuit, then hop on a red-eye to Miami, where her latest Hollywood project, a 2017 Baywatch reboot, beckoned. She remained poised and unflappable, punctuating all her answers with an incandescent smile—surely, a learning from her Miss World days—and a healthy dash of self-deprecation. “I just don’t want to screw up anyone’s name, you know?” she told E! News’s Ryan Seacrest, who appeared visibly disarmed by that admission.
I was catapulted back to a Manhattan press conference, circa September 2015. I’d sat just a few feet away from Chopra (who was in town to promote her then brand-new American television show,Quantico) and was basking in the actor’s second-hand stardust while the voice recorder in my hands trembled slightly. As she hopscotched between Hindi and English, confessing a deep love for Burger King Whoppers while recapping a childhood that included shuttling across various cities in India (her parents were military doctors) in addition to a four-year stay in the US as a teen, it occurred to me that the powerhouse and I, a freshly-minted Indian-American who had arrived by way of Japan, shared an unlikely trait: we were both unable to neatly gift-wrap our histories and hometowns when prodded about where we were “really” from, comfortably residing outside the traditional conventions of nationality. It’s partly why I’ve rooted for her since.
“There is no strategy”
Her résumé mirrors a steady build-up to a crescendo—with the occasional wrong note, of course. After all, it’s hard to forget that Chopra’s fledgling Bollywood career, the obvious next step for Miss World 2000, consisted of a clutch of bland rom-coms. It was only in 2008, when she snagged the lead in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion, a film that captured the murky warts-and-all underbelly of glamour, that she leapt towards the big leagues. At a time when female-centric storylines were considered the ultimate swan songs in testosterone-riddled Bollywood, Chopra’s uninhibited performance as a small-town beauty with supermodel ambitions swivelled heads for its stark vulnerability, resulting in a National Film Award for Best Actress and meatier subsequent roles.
Her résumé mirrors a steady build-up to a crescendo—with the occasional wrong note, of course. After all, it’s hard to forget that Chopra’s fledgling Bollywood career, the obvious next step for Miss World 2000, consisted of a clutch of bland rom-coms. It was only in 2008, when she snagged the lead in Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion, a film that captured the murky warts-and-all underbelly of glamour, that she leapt towards the big leagues. At a time when female-centric storylines were considered the ultimate swan songs in testosterone-riddled Bollywood, Chopra’s uninhibited performance as a small-town beauty with supermodel ambitions swivelled heads for its stark vulnerability, resulting in a National Film Award for Best Actress and meatier subsequent roles.
Then she veered West in 2012, recording a track with Black Eyed Peas singer will.i.am and subsequently producing an earworm of a single, ‘Exotic’, joining forces with international rapper Pitbull. While the tunes themselves were lukewarm at best, they spurred bigger things, including a sultry stint in a Guess ad campaign and the lead role in Quantico, a terrorism-themed mystery that made her the first Indian actor to bag top billing in an American television drama when it premiered on ABC last September.
“There is no strategy,” insists the 33-year-old, who carved out the time for an early-morning phone call from Montreal, Canada, where she was logging superhuman hours shooting for Quantico. Chopra plays Alex Parrish, a fearless Indian-American FBI recruit framed for executing the deadliest attack on New York City since 9/11. It’s easy to see how that twisty role, the first part Chopra ever had to formally audition for, served as the unofficial try-out to the aforementioned Baywatch remake, where she’ll play a baddie, single-handedly taking on an elite crew of lifeguards, starring heavy-hitters like Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock and Zac Efron. “Let me show you how slow-motion running is done, Hollywood!” she quips with a throaty giggle. For a moment, I’m unsure of where her cinematic loyalty lies before reminding myself that rather than claiming just Hollywood or Bollywood, she’s on a trailblazing mission to embrace both.
Though Chopra is quick to summarise a 16-year entertainment career through a few fortune-cookie-flavoured phrases—“when man proposes, God disposes,” she says—her professional trajectory reads like an overachiever’s playbook. While she may passionately deny the existence of a grand future vision, Chopra is never without an immediate game plan. The latest in her growing list of accolades are a 2015 Padma Shri and a People’s Choice award she scored in the US for her debut on Quantico, the ultimate vote of confidence from a stateside audience.
“ABC pushed a totally unknown face to mainstream America,” says Aseem Chhabra, a New York City-based film critic and programmer for the New York Indian Film Festival. He is alluding to the publicity blitzkrieg the network launched last fall. Chopra’s face was splattered on buses and billboards across major American cities, ensuring no one’s morning commute, including mine, was devoid of a PC sighting. “It’s pretty remarkable for them to show so much faith in her and invest in her that way,” Chhabra adds.
The American Dream“I’m an education portal for those who don’t know what India is,” Chopra admits, only half-joking. “I help people understand our movies—no, we don’t just randomly break into song and dance, that’s an important part of our storytelling.” Thankfully, there’s a palpable sense of camaraderie that streams through Quantico’s multicultural ensemble, evident in the nicknames they’ve assigned each other— Chopra’s is “Priyonccupied” for her incessant multitasking. “Out of any of us, [Chopra’s] the most displaced, the furthest away from home,” says Johanna Braddy, her roommate on the show. “But she’s so endearing. She helps people even when she doesn’t have to, whether it’s offering rides to airports or giving advice on how to be a strong woman.”
Chopra’s careful not to gloss over the challenges that come with the groundbreaking role: “People think I’m just waltzing on set and practicing an American accent but it’s so much more than that,” she asserts. “I’m embodying someone whose spirit is American and it’s all very out of my comfort zone.”
Her current comfort zone is difficult to pinpoint, even for Chopra, though she jovially claims it features high altitudes. “I feel the most local on a flight, where no one can get in touch with me, though having a nomadic life wasn’t always my cup of tea,” she says, describing the draining 17 hour haul between Montreal and Mumbai. It’s the inevitable price she pays for being a transcontinental sensation. The second half of Quantico’s first season premiered on March 6, while Jai Gangaajal, director Prakash Jha’s high-voltage crime drama, hit theatres on March 4. “If Priyanka’s decided she wants something, she will do all the possible things to get it—within 15 minutes of my narrating the Jai Gangaajal script to her, she declared no one else could play [the lead role],” Jha recently said in an interview. For the film, which features her as the first female police superintendent in a corruption-laced district in Bihar, Chopra allotted a whirlwind 30 days before jetting back to Canada.
“I was concerned about [Quantico] because there hasn’t been a precedent for this—I’d never seen Indian actors in the West leading television shows,” explains Chopra. Quantico isn’t ABC’s only current programme that showcases a minority lead. The network is responsible for a cavalcade of recent shows—Scandal, How To Get Away With Murder, and Fresh Off The Boat, to name a few—that reflect the demographic changes sweeping America. It’s the sort of dynamic television that serves as the perfect antidote to the social media maelstrom surrounding this year’s Academy Awards, which were accused of being woefully tone-deaf in the race department. Chopra, in all her cosmopolitan glory, couldn’t have planned her US entrance at a more appropriate time.
But Chopra’s trepidation surrounding her great American experiment isn’t completely unwarranted. At 12, after spending much of her young life in various north Indian cities, she tried her luck at a local high school while visiting cousins in Iowa. To hear her recap her initial tryst with the US is reminiscent of some of the more cringe-worthy scenes from the teen flick Mean Girls: navigating impossible-to-befriend cliques, scarfing down lunch solo in a bathroom stall and enduring juvenile taunts like “brownie” and “curry.” I can’t help but wish that her high school bullies are gawking, slack-jawed and sheepish when Chopra dominates their TV screens today—the ultimate revenge fantasy—gracing red carpets and late-night talk shows.
When our conversation shifts towards the Indian cinema scene—after Chopra’s award-winning portrayal of Kashibai in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 18th-century warrior romance, Bajirao Mastani (2015), there are faint rumours about her taking on his next untitled opus alongside Irrfan Khan— she brightens up. “I think it’s a great time for female actors in [Hindi cinema],” she says. “But it took a big fight from performers like Vidya [Balan] and Kangana [Ranaut], women who have taken cinema forward and enabled audiences to have faith in the fact that whether a story is told by a male or female, ultimately, just watch it because it’s a good story.”
Chopra’s willingness to credit her peers makes her an anomaly in an industry that is somewhat stingy with its praise. But maybe shaking up convention is one of the perks of being a perennial outsider. It’s hard to imagine any of her Bollywood contemporaries so at ease on American primetime—who can forget her breezy appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, where she regaled the audience by revealing her childhood crush on rapper Tupac Shakur? On a recent episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, she challenged the host to a chicken wing-eating contest, winning all too gracefully. Then again, she’s equally at home on Koffee With Karan, battling it out with Deepika Padukone (also soon to make her American movie debut) for that notorious gift hamper.
Chopra’s blueprint for global domination isn’t an easy one to decipher. As far as I can tell, its identifying marks include an inimitable hustle, the constant need to shatter stereotypes and a borderline obsession with uncharted territory. “For me, it’s about surpassing what I’ve done before—how do I become bigger and better?” she divulges as her voice trails, momentarily. “I just put my head down, keep working and make sure I’m the best person for the job.”
Photographed by Chris Craymer; Styled by Priyanka Kapadia; Hair: Julie Saint-Laurent/Next Canada using Label.m (Priyanka), Nisha Gulati/Folio Montreal (cheerleaders); Make-up: Hung Vanngo/The Wall Group (Priyanka), Alexandre Deslauriers/Folio Montreal (cheerleaders); Models: Karina Savoie/Dulcedo Management, Ann-Sophie Mongeau/Agence France Dionne, Kathy Maguire; Photographer’s agency: Sarah Laird and Good Company; Photographer’s assistants: Dong Loga, Pablo Calderón-Santiago; Assistant stylist: Rima Chahine; Hair assistant: Alexandra Muñoz; Digital imaging: Alex Dow Production (Eloi Beauchamp, Karyne Bond, Nicolas Chabot/l’Éloi), Julia Ferrier, Divya Jagwani
Have you seen Priyanka Chopra on the cover of ‘Time’ magazine?
From Padma Shri to Time 100 honoree, Priyanka Chopra’s winning streak is just growing stronger and stronger. The star found herself not just on Vogue India’s cover this month, but also fronting one of the six covers celebrating Time’s 100 Most Influential People (other covers include Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Zuckerberg and Nicki Minaj).
Needless to say, the star is thrilled. Her Instagram post featuring the cover has received more than 33,000 likes in less than an hour!
Chopra’s climb up was, of course, hasn’t always been smooth. In her interview with Time, she says, “When I was very young, I was 19 and I was doing the first few movies, I remember that my dates weren’t working out. My scheduling wasn’t working out for a movie with a very big actor. And the producer said, ‘Well, she can’t work it out, it’s fine, we’ll just cast someone else. Or, you know what? I’ll launch a new girl because girls are replaceable.’ I didn’t understand it then. But I think subconsciously it really worked on my mind, and I started picking up parts which were strong, which were not just the damsel in distress waiting for someone to rescue me. As much as I like being rescued. Every girl does … Now 13, 15 years later, whatever, I think that the movies that I do, I’m irreplaceable and the boys are replaceable.”
Inspirational, right? Catch her full interview here.
See how much Priyanka Chopra’s beauty looks have evolved through the years:
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