The “beguiling, sexy” actor Priyanka Chopra said was “born for the silver screen”
Did you know that Bollywood cinema produces twice the output of Hollywood, or that the films that come out of India sell some 3.5 billion tickets a year, or that Bollywood superstar Priyanka Chopra is married to a Jonas brother?
OK, fair enough, you might know the last one, but that’s because Chopra has become the most successful Bollywood export to make the jump to mainstream movies in the US, thanks to some 20 years making films in her own country and then switching to big-budget American movies like The Matrix Resurrections and 2017’s Baywatch reboot with The Rock.
She’s now making waves (ha!) in the new pirate adventure thriller The Bluff on Prime Video, co-starring Dredd himself, Karl Urban, with The Russo brothers producing and Zoe Saldaña executive producing, which is all very impressive stuff, it has to be said. A throwback to the swashbuckling action films of the Golden Age of Hollywood, The Bluff tells the tale of Chopra’s former pirate forced to pick up her sword and go killing when her past catches up to her.
It marks another major production for Chopra, who only last year teamed up with Idris Elba and John Cena for Heads of State, another Prime Video affair that saw her playing an MI6 agent attempting to halt bad guys from killing not just the British prime minister, but the US president too. Reviews were better than you might expect for that kind of straight-to-streaming effort, and it underlined Chopra as a multi-genre actor that casting directors are taking seriously.
It’s all a long way from the start of this century, when she became Miss World back in 2000 and made her first Tamil language film two years later, the action drama Thamizan, following which she made her Bollywood debut a year later in The Hero: Love Story of a Spy, one of the highest-grossing movies that year, and in 2004, she made the film she credits as a pivotal moment in her career, the romantic thriller Aitraaz.
Over the next two decades, Chopra would appear in countless films across different genres, picking up awards including two coveted National Film Awards, while also breaking through in the US as a musical artist, teaming up for releases with will.i.am and Pitbull.
As for influences, there’s one actor that stood above all others for her, the woman who was known as the first female superstar of Indian cinema, Sridevi Kapoor, or simply Sridevi. Active for some 50 years, her career began as a child actor in the late 1960s, and she went on to appear in 300 films in a variety of Indian languages. In 2013, she was voted ‘India’s Greatest Actress in 100 Years’, and her comedic and dancing skills inspired generations of future stars.
Sridevi died suddenly in 2018 at just 54, her passing marked by a funeral with full state honours and tens of thousands of mourners in the streets. Chopra said at the time, “She was born for the silver screen. She changed the course of Indian cinema. Everyone wanted her and wanted to be like her. She could be childlike, grown up, funny, serious, beguiling, sexy; she was the ultimate actor.”
She added, “She was my childhood, and one of the big reasons I became an actor. To refer to all of us as mere fans would be a disservice to her. Sridevi leaves behind a legacy that will live beyond us all, a legacy built on the foundation of pure dedication, talent, hard work and a sprinkle of fairy dust that was showered on her by the Gods!”
