Global icon Priyanka Chopra Jonas recently opened up about finally earning as much as her male costar in Hollywood. Spilling the beans on the same, Priyanka revealed that her upcoming series ‘Citadel’ is the first project where she’s ever received equal pay to her male co-stars in her acting career spanning for 20 years.
According to an interview for BBC’s 100 Women as quoted in a report by Variety, a US-based outlet, Chopra Jonas said, “I’ve never had pay parity in Bollywood,” she further said,”I would get paid about 10% of the salary of my male co-actor. [The pay gap] is large, substantially large. And so many women still deal with that. I’m sure I will too if I worked with a male co-actor now in Bollywood.”
“My generation of female actors have definitely asked [for equal pay],” she added. “We’ve asked, but we’ve not got it.”
As per a report by Variety, Chopra Jonas described other ways in which she dealt with sexism while working on Bollywood productions, she said, “I thought it was absolutely ok to sit for hours and hours on set, while my male co-actor just took his own time, and decided whenever he wanted to show up on set is when we would shoot”.
“I was called ‘black cat’ and ‘dusky’, I mean, what does ‘dusky’ even mean in a country where we are literally all brown?” Chopra Jonas continued. “I thought I was not pretty enough, I believed that I would have to work a lot harder, even though I thought I was probably a little bit more talented than my fellow actors who were lighter skinned.”
The upcoming ‘Citadel’ on Amazon Prime Video comes from the ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ filmmakers Joe and Anthony Russo and has an ensemble cast led by Chopra Jonas and Richard Madden. The show is marketed as an “action-packed spy series” that takes place worldwide and is intended to serve as the basis for spinoff series in countries such as Mexico, India, and Spain. (ANI)
