Priyanka Chopra was told to "get a boob job" and "add a little cushioning" to her butt when she embarked on an acting career.
Priyanka Chopra
The 'White Tiger' actress was told to overhaul her appearance after she won Miss World in 2000 and admitted she left the meeting with the unnamed director filled with doubt, particularly because her then-manager agreed with his assessment.
She wrote in her new autobiography 'Unfinished': "After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him. 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.
"If I wanted to be an actress, he said, I’d need to have my proportions 'fixed', and he knew a great doctor in LA 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."
The 38-year-old star insisted her experience was "normalised" in Hollywood and she was told to keep quiet about the incident if she wanted to enjoy a long career.
She told Metro.co.uk: "It’s so normalised that it doesn’t come up in conversation. I talked about a movie that I walked out of because of how I was spoken to by the director.
"It was early in my career, but I never told him why I walked out. 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 normalised 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.
"‘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."
Priyanka - who is married to Nick Jonas - thinks it's now a great time to be a woman in Hollywood as so many females are taking charge of their own careers.
She said: "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.'
"We see so many women that have banded together to be able to do it ourselves and [are] taking back our power. Now we’re seeing, we are that generation that is hopefully going to see women in leadership roles, that is going to see women in roles of power, so that the next generation that comes after us doesn’t have to inherit these issues."
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