Priyanka Chopra recently spoke at the annual Harvard India Conference. During the interaction, the Desi Girl spoke about her early days in Hollywood, when she was just starting out after her work in India suffered. She shared how she once waited an entire day for a small scene to be shot on the set of a Hollywood film.
While speaking, Priyanka reflected on the difficult phase she was going through in her career in India at the time and how she encountered those challenges with a determination to ‘build her legacy’. She said, “I was going through something at that time and I just walked into this interview, just wrong, you know? When your nerve endings hurt, and this was 11-12, whatever many years ago and I was watching an interview recently and I heard myself say, ‘I want a legacy. I don’t want a career. I want a legacy’. And I was thinking about what it meant for me at that time. What did that mean? What did that girl think a legacy would be?”
She added, “What you think your success means at any given time of your life is going to be so different. And that was when I was just starting out in America.”
Priyanka admitted that she was trying to survive professionally as things were not going well for her in India, which pushed her to focus on making a mark in Hollywood. She said, “I was dealing with a lot when it comes to my work back in India and I was trying to survive and I think my goal was, I want another magazine and that’s the only way I could wake up every morning and go through the small role that I have to do and a triple banger trailer, which is, three actors in one trailer.”
She also shared how she once waited nearly 15 hours on set for her shot, only for it not to be completed that day. “And wait for like 15 hours and not be shot that day. Those are things I hadn’t experienced in my career back home. And I was okay to do it every morning because I was like, ‘I’m going for that long term. I’m going for that legacy’,” she said.