Priyanka Chopra recalled the “dehumanizing moment” a film director put her in an uncomfortable situation on set.
The actress, 40, revealed that an unnamed Bollywood filmmaker had asked to see her underwear during the early years of her career.
“This may have been 2002 or 2003,” she told The Zoe Report.
“I’m undercover, I’m seducing the guy — obviously that’s what girls do when they’re undercover. But I’m seducing the guy and you have to take off one piece of clothing [at a time],” she recalled.
“I wanted to layer up [but] 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,” Chopra went on. “He said it to the stylist in front of me. 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.’”
The “Citadel” star said the ordeal prompted her to quit the project two days later, but said she paid the production crew out of pocket for the money they’d lost after her father urged her to do so.
“I just couldn’t look at [the director] every day,” she added.
Chopra recently revealed the reason she left Bollywood, saying she felt “pushed into a corner” by the industry.
“I had people not casting me, I had beef with people, I am not good at playing that game so I kind of was tired of the politics and I said I needed a break,” she said on Dax Shepherd’s “Armchair Expert” podcast in March.
It was soon after that she kickstarted her short-lived music career, which eventually got her into Hollywood.
“This music thing gave me an opportunity to go into another part of the world, not crave for the movies I didn’t want to get but I would require to schmooze certain clubs and cliques of people,” she explained.
“It would require groveling and I had worked a long time by then that I didn’t feel like I wanted to do it.”
“So when this music thing came I was like ‘f–k it I’am going to America,’” she added.
Since then, Chopra had gone on to land leading roles in major TV shows.