Priyanka Chopra Jonasis speaking out about her experience getting into the acting industry after her beauty pageant breakthrough.
The 38-year-old actress — who was crowned Miss World in 2000 — revealed in her new autobiographyUnfinishedthat a director once told her to get a “boob job” and fix her “proportions” (advice that her manager at the time agreed with).
“After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him,” she wrote in the memoir, out Feb. 9, according toMetro UK. “I did. He stared at me long and hard, assessing me, and then suggested that I get a boob job, fix my jaw, and add a little more cushioning to my butt.”
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“If I wanted to be an actress, he said, I’d need to have my proportions ‘fixed,’ and he knew a great doctor in L.A. he could send me to. My then-manager voiced his agreement with the assessment.”
“I left the director/producer’s office feeling stunned and small. Was he right that I couldn’t be successful unless I had so many body parts ‘fixed’? I thought of how individuals in the media and others in the industry had referred to me as ‘dusky’ and ‘different-looking,’ and I wondered if I was cut out for this business after all,” she continued.
Speaking withMetro UK, Chopra Jonas elaborated on the situation, explaining that the type of criticism she received was “normal” to hear.
“I never had the courage to stand up for myself, and actually admit it. Because I heard so often, ‘Don’t be a nuisance, you’re new in the industry, you don’t want to have a reputation that you cause trouble or you’re not easy to work with.’ Now on the other side of 35. I know that’s a normalized thing that girls hear so often.”
“I fell for it too, even though I consider myself a forward-thinking, smart girl. I learned from that over time, but at that time, I was terrified,“The Sky Is Pinkstar added. “Yes, I faced that then, I faced that like everybody else when you’re in patriarchal industries, which ours has been for a very long time.”
“I’ve mentioned a bunch of female producers in the book that I really admire, who’ve taken charge of their own lives and said, ‘Alright, you’re not going to make a part for me or the movie that I want to be in, I’m going to produce it myself,'” she told the outlet.
Unfinishedhits bookshelves on Feb. 9.
source: people.com
