Priyanka Chopra Describes “Dehumanizing” Experience When Director Insisted on Seeing Her Underwear

If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the #MeToo movement and from Hollywood in general, it’s that no matter how big of a star you are, if you’re a woman in the industry, you have very likely experienced some form of sexual harassment or objectification. Priyanka Chopra is the latest actress to reveal how a “dehumanizing” incident early in her career working with a male director affected her and made her feel like her work was “not important.”

In an interview with The Zoe Report, Chopra recalled a role she accepted in a Bollywood film where she was playing someone who went undercover.

“This may have been 2002 or ’03. I’m undercover, I’m seducing the guy — obviously that’s what girls do when they’re undercover,” Chopra said. “But I’m seducing the guy and you have to take off one piece of clothing [at a time]. I wanted to layer up. The filmmaker was like, ‘No, I need to see her underwear. Otherwise why is anybody coming to watch this movie?’

“He didn’t say it to me. He said it to the stylist in front of me,” she continued. “It was such a dehumanizing moment. It was a feeling of, ‘I’m nothing else outside of how I can be used, my art is not important, what I contribute is not important.'”

Chopra says that the incident prompted her to quit the film and pay the production team out of her own pocket. She explained, “I just couldn’t look at [the director] every day.”

In the time since that incident, Chopra found mainstream, global success on the show Quantico, and she can currently be seen in both the Prime Video series Citadel and the new film Love Again, which is out on VOD this week.