Learn English with Priyanka Chopra Jonas. In this inspiring 2019 Women in the World interview, she reveals how she shattered Hollywood stereotypes, champions girls’ education, and balances global fame with purposeful philanthropy. All while sharing practical lessons about seizing opportunity and believing in your own voice.
Who This Speech Is For
Learners interested in global careers, gender equality, and Indian representation in Western media.
Fans of Bollywood or Hollywood looking to build vocabulary around entertainment and activism.
Intermediate to advanced learners who enjoy conversational interviews with cultural insights.
How This Speech Helps Your English
Discover how to speak confidently about identity, ambition, and global issues.
Learn phrases for discussing cultural comparison, career choices, and social change.
Hear natural spoken English in a live interview setting with humor and personal storytelling.
Understand how tone shifts when discussing serious vs. personal topics.
Why This Speech Matters
Priyanka shares how she overcame stereotypes in both Bollywood and Hollywood.
The speech highlights the importance of giving women choices—in work, relationships, and voice.
Offers powerful insight into how celebrities can use fame for positive impact, from UNICEF work to launching women-first platforms like Bumble in India.
”Work on yourself daily.
Transcript
Tina Brown: Well, you think that you’ve got talent. This incredible woman, she sings, she dances, she acts, she’s an activist, she’s a philanthropist. Welcome Priyanka Chopra.
Priyanka Chopra: Thank you so much.
Tina Brown: It’s so good to see you.
Priyanka Chopra: Congratulations to you, 10 years of this incredible summit of empowering women. Yes?
Tina Brown: Yes. Thank you.
Priyanka Chopra: Big cheers.
Tina Brown: So listen, Priyanka, I do go to India a lot and Bollywood has some pretty huge stars, but they never cross over and make it here. They just don’t. You are a first in that you crossed over and you became a blazing star in both places. Aside from obvious things such as your talent, hard work, drive, all the rest of it, what were the unique factors that caused you to really break out here in the way that you have, unlike so many other very talented actors?
Priyanka Chopra: I think first of all, Tina, I think quite a few of the actors that I have spoken to don’t really have ambitions of moving out of an extremely huge movie industry. Bollywood is one of the biggest producing industries in the world, if not the first. And the demographic of Indian films goes all over the world. So a lot of my actor friends, they’re not even… they’re not interested in it. But the ones who are, I think there is a little bit of a problem when it comes to casting of South Asians in Hollywood. A little bit of a problem. We are always stereotyped into the kind of parts we should do and the kind of parts that, you know, you see a South Asian as. And they always end up getting, you know, “amp up your Indian accent” and few of those. So I think what I chose to do differently, and it’s unfortunate that I had to make that choice, was when I came to America, I decided to play ethnically ambiguous parts. My first part was Alex Parrish. She was Indian, but that was nothing that… it had nothing to do with the show. Then I did Baywatch. I played Victoria Leeds. Then I did Isn’t It Romantic? I was Isabella Stone. But it took me playing ethnically ambiguous parts to be mainstream in mainstream pop culture.
Tina Brown: And did you sort of deliberately eschew those other kinds of parts where you said “I’m not going to do that because that’s for an Indian girl?”
Priyanka Chopra: No, I said I’m not going to do that because then all you will see me is what I already know I can do. I am Indian. I don’t need my parts to justify why I can be an actor. And it would take me doing that to become mainstream enough now to actually play parts where I am my own ethnicity. And I will not be considered as a niche actor or an actor that can only do that.
Tina Brown: Right, I get it. I get it. So what do you think are the real differences between, you know, being a huge star that you are in both places? What’s the difference between doing this in America and doing this in Bollywood? Because as you said, it was kind of insular of me in the first place to say, why don’t people want to be in America more already or cross over? Because as you say, Bollywood is a massive industry and we tend to think that Hollywood is everything. You say it’s a massive, massive industry. So what is the difference in being a performer there to being a performer here? What in terms of power and privacy and the roles you’re offered?
Priyanka Chopra: I mean, privacy is something I gave up on a long time ago. I’m over that, that’s not gonna happen. But I think that culturally they’re both so different. What Bollywood movies stand for is an experience, it’s magnum, it’s colorful, it has song and dance and colors and music. And the work that I do here is catering to a different culture altogether. Like I always got into trouble whenever I used to come from India to work on Quantico. I used my hands a lot to express, and my directors would always be like, “Just turn it down a little bit.” And I never understood that. I’m Indian, I express.
Tina Brown: But like little things like that I have to control when I go beyond. When I go back to Bollywood, I have to remember that I need to be big. But you have all these wonderful entertainment skills of singing and dancing and so on. Can you bring that into our American culture?
Priyanka Chopra: Give me another year and a half. I have a few things up my sleeve.
Tina Brown: Oh, good. I want to see that. I want to, we all want to see this. Now, what about the whole Me Too movement? Has that hit Bollywood in the same way that it has in Hollywood?
Priyanka Chopra: Yes, I don’t think it hit Bollywood the same way that it hit Hollywood, but I think there was… there still is a period of time where women found the courage to be able to speak up things that they had not spoken up. There were incredible women that stood up and took on men in a very patriarchal country. And that takes an incredible amount of courage. And I extremely applaud that, but then there are so many other stories that do get shushed and that do get shut down because it is patriarchal. But I think India has reached a place, just like the rest of the world where women… we always had a voice. Nobody heard us. Now, because of the support that we are giving each other, people don’t have the ability to shut us down and that’s what happened in India and it was such an incredibly powerful thing to see. For me, knowing that I have seen women who’ve talked about things that have happened to them or situations where they decide to not talk about it or they’ll say, “I don’t wanna talk about it, I don’t wanna cause a scene, I don’t bring too much attention to myself, I’ll be blamed,” but that’s not the conversation anymore. And just the fact that the conversation is shifting is so incredibly powerful.
Tina Brown: Have you ever experienced that kind of harassment yourself?
Priyanka Chopra: I mean, this is a question I wanna ask everyone. What’s the difference between being abused, harassed? What are we talking about? If I talk about sexual harassment, which I think every woman in this room probably has, how many have? That’s a pretty full house. So I think it was harassment and sexual harassment had become a norm with women. That it’s okay to just lightly tap a girl on her bum and it’s okay to just make comments which are sort of unnecessary and not required because boys will be boys. Because come on, he’s just being a guy. As women, as society, we’ve had people who we trust and love say that to us, that we never even questioned it. And slowly, I think this is probably after, at least in my lifetime, one of the first times that I’ve seen women support each other so much and come and stand with each other that now if I have a story, I don’t feel like I’m alone anymore. And nor am I ashamed of it. And because of maybe my strength, or your strength, or your strength, it’ll give some girl who’s sitting in the anonymity of a home, not being able to even have a choice or a voice, the power to be able to do that, and that’s extremely amazing.
Tina Brown: Now, your mother and father were very big influences on you, and your dad encouraged your singing, and your mother was very much a role model. She’s an accomplished doctor, and your father is a surgeon, right, in the army. Did they really raise you to be this very independent young woman? Because so often in India, the girl child isn’t given that same kind of push that the boys are.
Priyanka Chopra: You know, India is in such an amazing precipice of change right now, and I’m sure you’ll notice. There is this incredible modernity that exists in India because of it being an ever-growing economy. There’s such an interest from all over the world in India because of what it provides in terms of entertainment, in terms of business. So it’s at this precipice of modernity versus tradition, which sort of clashes a little bit.
Tina Brown: And there’s pushback too.
Priyanka Chopra: Yeah, there’s pushback, but it’s an incredible time. Like my parents, for example, I was raised to be opinionated. I was never told to be quiet. Women should be seen, not heard. That was not something that happened in my house. Everyone in my, at least in my side of the family, my family is very matriarchal, if I may say so. So I was raised in a very different environment. My dad never liked it when I went into the kitchen because he knew that the environment that he grew up in, girls were just relegated to that. And he didn’t want me to be relegated to that because I was a little bit of a renegade and I had crazy dreams and I wanted to be so much. So there is that kind of parenting as well in India. There is that kind of upbringing as well in India, but also at the same time, India is one of the oldest countries in the world. We’re thousands of years old in terms of our culture. So it’s so hard when you think about changing mindsets that have existed for centuries. Just to give you context, America is about 400 years old. It’s one of the youngest countries in the world. So think about how far back these ideologies go and how deep seated they are in society. So the fact that India is at the place where it is, where it’s giving its women so much power is so incredible to see for me.
Tina Brown: Do you feel, are you trying to sort of use your own celebrity to push those boundaries at all? Do you see that as a role for a celebrity today?
Priyanka Chopra: I do. I feel like a social responsibility is something we all as individuals need to feel. But yes, as a public person, I do see that I have a platform where people may not adhere to what I say, but they will hear me. I’m a conduit, a means to an end. When I make my trips with UNICEF or I do philanthropy, I’m not physically changing the world, but I’m bringing attention to something where, unfortunately, people like to read about me falling on the red carpet a lot more than anything else that I do. So I take that power and actually have, bring the attention onto something that the world actually needs to talk about. And yes, I do think that’s a social responsibility of public people and a lot more people need to do it.
Tina Brown: You know, your early sort of beginnings of your whole sort of career propulsion happened with the Miss India and the Miss World wins, right? In some ways, you know, it seems almost anachronistic for this incredibly, you know, independent young woman raised by these very sort of rigorous parents with their careers and so on, for you to enter beauty patterns. I mean, what was that about? Was that what drove you to do that?
Priyanka Chopra: So the way I see it is that feminism is all about choices, right? And every woman, every individual woman, individual choice. So when I was 18, I was 17 actually, when I went to Miss India, I’d never modeled in my life. That was Miss World, But I was extremely awkward, but I liked winning. It’s my greatest friend and greatest joy. So when the opportunity came by for Miss India, it’s an extremely prestigious pageant in India. It’s not… like I think that the pageant world has a very bad reputation in the US, whereas in India, the pageant world is very cohesive to the entire personality of a woman. What you look like, how you speak, especially how much you know. And that was really, there was a lot of attention that was placed on the substance, even for Ms. World. And I feel like for me, it was one of the greatest experiences in my life because it prepared me to sit in front of 1,000 people like this and not be afraid. It prepared me to have conversation with dignitaries of states and kids in a school. And at 18 and 17, set a foundation that made me extremely worldly wise, I guess. So for me, it was an amazing experience.
Tina Brown: On Bollywood, it used to be quite an insular industry with a few small families dominating. How hard was it for you to break into Bollywood? Was that itself its own mountain to climb?
Priyanka Chopra: Yes, Bollywood, nepotism and Bollywood go hand in hand. Everyone knows that, who knows Bollywood. But there have been a few incredible actors over the years that have been able to penetrate that and make a name for themselves and then create their own legacy, which is something I’m hoping to do. It was very hard. I didn’t know anyone. Everyone was friends with everybody when I joined the movie business and I’m not really good at networking. I’m not very good at like going to the parties and doing the thing. So it was a little difficult, but I kind of depended on the fact that I was not afraid to take on risky paths. I depended on the fact that I would do things and perform in my characters, that when people come out of a movie, they don’t recognize me, they recognize my character. I started working on the craft, I started working on the art of it. Of course, I learned dancing and made sure that I was good at that. But I think working on yourself sort of gave me the ability to create those opportunities. And from my first film, which did really well, and I got a lot of accolades for it, I think it was just uphill. I just made sure that I didn’t stop working on myself.
Tina Brown: Well, now you’re doing a lot of producing. I don’t think people realize that there are 22 languages and 720 dialects spoken in India, right? So you’re also producing a lot of material for sort of rural India, right? Which has got these different dialects and different languages. Why are you into decide to do that?
Priyanka Chopra: Well, it’s called regional cinema. And almost all of the Indian states have different written and spoken languages. So I’m not speaking… it’s not a dialect at all. It’s like the alphabet’s different, it sounds different, it’s culturally different. So India’s one of the most diverse countries in the world and each state has its own, almost each state has its own localized culture. And every culture has storytellers. Storytellers exist everywhere. From our grandparents who tell us stories in beds, in our bed, which my grandmother used to do. And I had a very vivid imagination because of that. And I felt like I wanted to be able to give, shed light on local storytellers and create that and position them into having their own industry, which eventually leads us into having a great entertainment business. But I just love the fact of supporting people that may not have the kind of support without other people doing it for them.
Tina Brown: Fascinating. Well, you got married recently, as I think everybody knows, to Nick Jonas, spectacular three day wedding. Why did he strike such a chord in you immediately? I mean, just tell us, we all have a love story.
Priyanka Chopra: Well, I’ve known him for two years, but I don’t know, I wasn’t… I didn’t think that this would be what it turned out to be, and that’s maybe my fault, I judged a book by its cover. But I think when I started actually dating Nick, he surprised me so much. Don’t tell anyone guys, even though this is live streaming. I call him old man Jonas. That’s my name for him, OMJ. He’s such a… He’s such a old soul, extremely smart, so good for me because he grounds me so much. And I’m a wild child. I do whatever I want, whenever I want. And he always supports me. One of the first things that I think struck me about him was we were on a date and it was time for the date to get over. And we were a bunch of friends and I had a meeting and I was dropping hints to my friends. They were like, “No, don’t go for a meeting, just stay.” And I was like, no, no, no, no. If someone gives me reason enough to cancel it, I’ll cancel it. And he just didn’t pick up the hint. I said it twice, he said it thrice. Finally, he took me aside and he was like, “Look, I’m not stupid, I know what you’re trying to do, but I will never be the one who will tell you to cancel work because I know how hard you’ve worked to be where you are. So if you could have canceled it, you would have done it. I’ll take our friends out for dinner and we’ll wait for you, and you finish your meeting and come back.” And I was just like, that’s the first time someone’s ever done that.
Tina Brown: Well, also so wonderful to know that you would have somebody who really respected your own work drive.
Priyanka Chopra: Absolutely, and who gave me credit for what I had done. It was just mind blowing for me.
Tina Brown: Well, your wedding was obviously, you played it king size in every way.
Priyanka Chopra: Hopefully it’ll be the only one.
Tina Brown: Yes, so were you making a statement with that because it was just so glorious to watch the way it just kind of accumulated into this kind of incredible fiesta that we saw.
Priyanka Chopra: Well, I knew it was gonna be three days because Indian weddings do have pre-rituals. And I knew that both of us wanted one wedding in each of our religions, so that was two days anyway. But it all happened so fast. We decided to prep this wedding in October, and we got married first of December. And in that one and a half months, we were just like, “Yeah, that sounds great. Sure, let’s get that.” And did not realize it ’til it was done. And we saw videos, and then the bill. Oh, cool, cool, cool. Maybe you should prep this a little bit more. So that’s why it was that glorious event.
Tina Brown: Okay, well, it’s pretty hard though for two stars, with such kind of huge followings and all of these work demands to actually kind of connect and carve out time. How are you doing that? How are you carving out time to be together?
Priyanka Chopra: I think that’s really important in any relationship, not just in a marriage, whether it’s with your friends, with your family, with your loved ones, is you have to prioritize what’s important to you. We make sure whenever we have manageable schedules that we spend that time with each other. If I’m filming, he’ll come down and he’ll stay where I am for a couple of days because at that time he has time off or if I have time off and there’s something I can do, we just make sure we don’t go more than two weeks without seeing each other, that’s it.
Tina Brown: And you do this work with UNICEF. Are you gonna do philanthropy together? Are you now going to become a couple that focuses your philanthropy or keep it separate?
Priyanka Chopra: Both. I think we want to be able to definitely do it together as well. Nick has always been philanthropic. His parents have been, I have been, my parents have been. We come from a family where philanthropy is not a choice, it’s just what you do. It’s second nature. And he has individually been doing it, but we’ve discussed many things that we want to do together and we know that we have the ability to. It’s in fact our favorite phrase that we wanna change the world in whatever way we can somehow.
Tina Brown: And what is your focus gonna be? I mean, you’ve been working mostly directed towards children, right? Is that gonna be your focus?
Priyanka Chopra: For me, it always has been children. It always has been education, children’s rights. I really, really believe that if we pay attention and we don’t enough to the children of the world, the world becomes a better place. I was in a few refugee camps when I went on trips with UNICEF and… there were all of these kids who were telling me their life’s dreams, right? And they’re all in refugee camps for like five years, six years. And they’re like, I wanna be an astronaut and I wanna be a dentist and I wanna be a teacher. And I knew when I was sitting in front of these kids that they wouldn’t be all of that because they don’t have an education. Forget a formal education. They’re in a refugee camp, thousands and thousands of these kids. Now think about the fact that if we don’t give them a pen in their hand, and if the world doesn’t care about the children of the future, how vulnerable they are to violence. How vulnerable are they for someone to put a gun in their hand and say, “The world didn’t care about you, why should you care about the world?” And that’s what we need to stop and protect. I mean, we may not be able to do it for our own generation because people are making this world into an extremely violent place, but I feel like if we target the kids and give them a place where they feel like they’re wanted, they have the ability to take their futures into their own hands, it’ll just change the mindset of the world. And I really, really wanna be able to do that.
Tina Brown: I knew you were gonna get clap for that. You’ve also got involved with Bumble, right? And you’re bringing a dating app to India. And I’m sort of fascinated about that because, India is a place which is sort of traditionally where arranged marriages have been such an important part of its culture. In some ways, I suppose, a dating app is also about the kind of, you know, the preview and the choice, and the kind of… it’s not about the chemistry meeting, it’s about choosing and making a kind of pragmatic choice. Do you find there is a kind of cultural resonance for dating apps in India?
Priyanka Chopra: So there are other dating apps in India. A couple of things. One, like I said, it’s an amazing time in India with the meeting of modernity and tradition that’s happening. You have urban India, urban culture, where people have traveled, they know about the world, everyone knows what’s happening. There is a culture of dating, definitely is. My parents had a love match, not an arranged match. So India’s just so diverse, it can’t be generalized. Second of all, Bumble, I’m very excited about it and super proud. Bumble is not just a dating app, it’s a social network. So it has Bumble Dating, which is what it’s known for mostly in America, but it has Bumble BFF, and the best part about it is Bumble Biz, which is, it’s sort of like whatever aspirations you might have, you can connect with people around wherever you are to help you take those aspirations forward when you make the first step. And why it’s so amazing for India, when I met Whitney last year, I was listening to her talk about Bumble in the US and the amazing part about it is that it gives the choice to women. And I can’t speak for every woman in India because they’re all so different, but I know the power of choice, the power of me having my choice, and we as independent women in the world, we take it for granted, the ability to have a say in our own lives. There are so many women around the world who have no say in when they’ll go to school, when they won’t go to school, who they will marry, what their lives will look like. And this sort of gives women a choice to be able to make a dent in not just their personal life, but also in their business and also in friendships. And I just found that so powerful and profound and wanted to be able to take it to India.
Tina Brown: So you’re such a, more than a triple threat, you’re a quintuplet threat, Priyanka. What do you want to do next? I mean, here you are in the US now, you have a world at your feet, you have this wonderful new marriage. I mean, what is the next decade for you in your mind? I mean, well, the next five years, okay, you have a game plan, you’re very driven. I know that you’re not just bopping along, thinking about being a wild child, even though you pretend you are.
Priyanka Chopra: Pretend I am, okay. I’m not a planner, honestly, I really am not. All I know is that opportunity strikes when you don’t expect it. The smarter thing to do is to recognize opportunity than work so hard in trying to create it. Like that’s what I’ve done all my life. When I came into America, I started doing Quantico. I knew the people I was meeting. I met amazing people. I’m writing a book this year. My editor Pam is here. I’m producing not just in India, but I’m also producing in America. I’m developing movies and television that I’m helping write myself. And these are all things that came out of opportunities when I had conversations with people like you. Just exactly like our conversation backstage.
Tina Brown: Yeah, we’ve just planned an India summit six cities just in the green room, so. I’m on the train with the Priyanka train now.
Priyanka Chopra: But it really is, I believe that ideas are the currency of the present. Allow your brain to have ideas. Think about how you can make those ideas real because this is the time when we can do it. Never before in the history of mankind have we been able to sit in our homes, have an idea, maybe create it into an app and monetize it. You can do anything anywhere. It’s just that people hold themselves back thinking that, “Oh, I don’t know if I could even attempt this because I don’t have connections.” You can make the connections. It’s all in the mindset and that has to be pivoted a little bit.
Tina Brown: Well, Priyanka, anything you do, believe me, you can pull it off. So I wanna thank you enormously for being with us.
Priyanka Chopra: Thank you so much.
Tina Brown: Priyanka Chopra.
