The rise and rise of Priyanka

Saibal Chatterjee

She is so my alter ego. She’s an amazing character. She’s cool and she totally has it together when she’s unravelling. She’s badass and flawed, yet extremely confident.

This is how Priyanka Chopra has described FBI recruit Alex Parrish, her well-received character in the ABC series Quantico. The first season of the show premiered in the last week of September and instantly turned her into a household name in the US.

Indeed, the Bollywood diva stamped herself so efficiently on the role that she went on to win the People’s Choice Award for ‘favourite actress in a new television show’. The fact that she was competing with the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis and Emma Roberts made the win doubly sweet. Fans are now looking forward to the second season of Quantico.

The leap from Bollywood to Montreal, where Quantico was shot, was no sweat for Priyanka. The series has her in the role of a rookie FBI agent (the character is of Latin American origin), who is suspected of involvement in a terrorist plot. Alex goes into hiding in order to clear her name by exposing those that are out to smear her reputation.

Quantico isn’t Priyanka’s first action role — apart from the two instalments of Farhan Akhtar’s Don, she is in the upcoming cop drama Jai Gangaajal — but it certainly gives her the opportunity to woo a new global constituency. Transitions come easy to the Jamshedpur-born Bareilly girl, who grew up in numerous cantonment towns that her Army doctor-dad was stationed in.

The nomadic existence, which included a four-year stint in an American high school, seems to have not only trained her to take every new move in her stride, but has endowed her with incredible high energy levels.

Thirteen years into her Bollywood career, Priyanka has established herself as a versatile performer. She has been just about everything on the big screen: a supermodel in Fashion, a boxer in Mary Kom, a pushy businesswoman in Aitraaz, a feisty seductress in Gunday, and even an autistic girl in Barfi! and a Maratha warrior’s wife in Bajirao Mastani.

“I go wherever my work takes me,” the 33-year-old has been quoted as saying in an interview, “To me, it’s an extension of me as an artiste. I’m an entertainer. You can take me anywhere and I’ll entertain.”

American showbiz is just another stop for the busy actress, who now also has a thriving musical career.

In a span of a year and bit, Priyanka has gone from playing a real-life pugilist in Mary Kom to getting into the garb of Kashibai, Peshwa Bajirao’s first wife, in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s grandiose Bajirao Mastani. And coming up ahead is Prakash Jha’s Jai Gangaajal, in which she gets into action mode as an upright cop who takes on the underworld. This follow-up to the 2003 Ajay Devgn-starrer will see the actress kick ass in a way that Bollywood heroines rarely do. The industry grapevine also has it that Priyanka is slated to play a superwoman in Abhinay Deo’s next production once the director is done with the sequel to Force.

Is Priyanka consciously working towards becoming a full-fledged female action star? Quantico has catapulted her into a league of one — she is the only Asian actress to ever topline an American television series. The People’s Choice Award — here too, she is the first Indian to get her hands around the trophy — is only the icing on the cake, and a shot in the arm.

Priyanka was only a teenager when she won the Miss World title in 2000. The international exposure that the win gave her prepared her for the challenges ahead, besides helping her land a lead role in the Tamil film, Tamizhan (2002).

Her first Hindi film The Hero — Love Story of a Spy starring Sunny Deol as an Army man fighting terrorism — had her playing second fiddle to Preity Zinta. But soon enough, she began making her presence felt in the Hindi cinema. It was 2004’s Aitraaz, produced by Subhash Ghai and directed by Abbas-Mustan, which demonstrated Priyanka’s potential as an actress for the first time. By 2006, she found herself among Bollywood’s top actresses, having done films like Krrish with Hrithik Roshan and Don with Shah Rukh Khan. However, she ran into a rough patch, delivering six flops in a row, including embarrassing bombs like Love Story 2050 and Drona.

But just when detractors began to write her off, Priyanka bounced back in 2008 with Madhur Bhandarkar’s Fashion. Essaying the role of a small-town girl, who takes a plunge into the world of glitz and glamour in Mumbai and emerges as a supermodel despite many hindrances in her way, she won a Best Actress National Award.

Since that dramatic turning point, Priyanka hasn’t looked back. Films like Kaminey (2009), 7 Khoon Maaf (2011), Barfi (2012) and Mary Kom (2014) have placed her career on a firm footing.

Quantico has enabled her to pull ahead of her rivals. Having made a strong impression in the series, she is now on the verge of more such breakthroughs, not just for herself but also for other Indian movie actresses of her generation.