Priyanka Chopra is a household name in India. But she is a relative
unknown in America, where she spent a part of her childhood. She hopes
that being the new face of Guess will change that.
Priyanka Chopra had a problem: what to do with the light.
The
actress, singer and latest in a long line of bombshell models for the
clothing line Guess was standing in a walk-in closet in the penthouse
suite of the Beverly Wilshire hotel, preparing for a photo shoot. “Maybe
if we shot it like this,” she said, pushing sheer curtains
aside and posing, Bond-girl like, in the sheet of sunlight that streamed
through a floor-to-ceiling window (yes, the closet had a window; it
also was bigger than some bedrooms).
“Good lighting is something that I know now, out of experience,” she said with a shrug.
Ms.
Chopra, 31, tall and sultry, has been photographed and filmed enough
times, appearing in more than 40 Bollywood movies since 2002, that such
tricks of the trade have become second nature. She travels with an
entourage (“When we walk into a room, it’s like ‘Ocean’s Twelve,’ ” she
said of “Team P.C.”) and knows, without the aid of a mirror, when her
dark, lustrous hair has been teased to just the right height.
And
yet, while Ms. Chopra is one of India’s biggest stars, she can eat
lunch on a busy Los Angeles sidewalk and not be approached by a single
selfie-seeking fan. This may be about to change, though.
“I
knew instantly that I wanted to photograph her for Guess,” Paul
Marciano, a founder of the company, wrote in an email, referring to his
first meeting with Ms. Chopra last spring. “Priyanka is extremely
talented and accomplished, and her wonderful personality comes through
in her photographs.”
She
also represents a major market that she and many of her collaborators
believe is ripe for a pop-culture idol of its own. “Apart from her
natural charisma,” Mr. Marciano wrote, “she’s one of the most recognized
and celebrated talents in India and international cinema,” which
factored into Guess’s decision to cast her in its campaign.
Ms.
Chopra said: “For me, the proudest thing about it was being someone of
ethnicity to break the quintessential bombshell mode. That girl has
changed. She can be from anywhere.”
In addition to the Guess campaign, which she celebrated at a Paper magazine party
with the designer Prabal Gurung last month, Ms. Chopra is also making a
pop music album with RedOne, a producer who’s worked with Jennifer
Lopez and Nicki Minaj.
Already,
she’s put out “Exotic,” a Miami Beach-appropriate ditty with the rapper
Pitbull. The music video, in which Ms. Chopra shimmies and shakes in a
half-dozen sequined, strappy outfits, has been viewed more than 30
million times on YouTube.
Her
first single, “In My City,” was the theme song for the 2013 season of
the NFL Network’s Thursday-night games; her next is an electronic-music
remake of the Bonnie Raitt ballad “I Can’t Make You Love Me.”
“No
one from my country has ever done pop music internationally,” Ms.
Chopra said. “I want to do things that haven’t been done before, I want
to create opportunities for people to come after me and say, ‘O.K., now
we can do this too.’ ”
Trailblazing, a word Ms. Chopra is fond of, usually includes navigating rough terrain.
“In
one part of the world, I’m one of the top actors in the country, and in
another part of the world, I’m a complete newcomer,” she said. “That’s
scary for me.”
As
a child, she said, she and her family moved all over India because her
father was a surgeon in the army, and she found herself having to make
new friends every two years. Her father also pushed her to take singing
lessons, which she began when she was 3.
“In school, I was the one they sent on stage when they wanted to win an award,” she said.
At
13, Ms. Chopra visited her mother’s sister in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and
fell in love with American culture. A guidance counselor at her cousin’s
high school persuaded her to stay and enroll there while her mom
returned home. To hear Ms. Chopra tell the story, it’s as if she were
deciding whether to go to the grocery store. “It was a whim,” she said.
High school was not as easy as Ms. Chopra imagined. (She compares it to the movie “Mean Girls.”)
“I
would pick up a packet of chips and go to the bathroom and eat because I
was so afraid to go to the cafeteria, where everyone had their own
friends and cliques,” she said.
After
traveling around the United States with her mother’s family, she
returned to India at 17 and was planning a career in aeronautical
engineering when her mother sent a few glamour shots to the Miss India
beauty pageant. Ms. Chopra went on to win the Miss World title in 2000.
“I was petrified,” she said of her pageant experience (though a grainy YouTube video suggests otherwise). “I didn’t know how to walk in heels and wear a massive gown. I just wanted it to be over.”
But
Bollywood movie offers and product endorsement deals began flooding in,
and, as Ms. Chopra put it, “I went from being a geek to a geek’s
fantasy.”
She easily warmed to acting; cross-disciplinary pop stardom was another matter. Anjula Acharia-Bath, a founder of DesiHits,
a media company that caters to the South Asian market, said that she
“totally had to stalk” Ms. Chopra to let her know that she and Jimmy
Iovine, a founder of Interscope records who has helped develop the
careers of such stars as Lady Gaga and Eminem, were interested in making
an album with her.
Ms.
Acharia-Bath said she was drawn to Ms. Chopra’s western sensibility,
with a predilection for top-40 hits and 1990s hip-hop, and the fact that
she could sing didn’t hurt.
“I
was trying to call her for months,” Ms. Acharia-Bath said. “She told me
she was filming in the middle of some jungle, and I thought that was
her way of pushing me off.”
For
a woman who never coveted international stardom, Ms. Chopra appears
entirely comfortable on its cusp. At a January recording studio session
with Nick Cannon, she bopped around in a leather miniskirt and black
stilettos, unselfconsciously singing along to a hip-hop beat, showing no
signs of a migraine that she said had confined her to bed for most of
the day.
And
she displayed a spirit of saucy, old Hollywood glamour. Talking about
the Indian paparazzi’s interest in her personal life, she said, “I make
sure I don’t have too much to hide.” She added conspiratorially, “And if
I do, I make sure I hide it really well,” throwing her head back with a
throaty laugh.
Beneath
Ms. Chopra’s confident, cool exterior, though, there are doubts, she
says. She admitted that it’s hard to build a western fan base while
persuading her Indian supporters that she is not abandoning them. (With
many Bollywood films in the works, she sometimes toggles between Hindi
and English when tweeting
to her 5.5 million followers.) In making her album, she said, she
struggles with the fear of: “What if I don’t get it right away? Can I
make mistakes?”
“I
know director-speak, I know film-speak, but music, I have to learn,”
she said. “It’s like I’m a kid again in another profession.”
An
old show business trope came to mind. “I can’t say I have an endgame
plan, but I believe in: ‘Aim for the stars. If you fall short, you’ll
fall on the moon,’ ” Ms. Chopra said.
She smiled wryly. “I mean, the moon’s pretty good, too.”
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