“Upstairs is crazy. This is definitely not normal.”

There’s a flurry of activity at the Chopra Jonas place in Encino. Dozens of people are rushing around, moving cars in and out of the garage, carrying boxes, and unwrapping dishes and glassware. Priyanka Chopra Jonas sits down across a table from me in the quiet game room downstairs and laughs: “I swear it’s not always like this.”

Priyanka, which she prefers that I call her here, is readying for a party, gathering her family, in-laws, and Hollywood friends for the first major event at her home in the San Fernando Valley. The house itself is a major event, by the way: a 20,000-square-foot home with a two-lane bowling alley, an indoor basketball court, a movie theater, and an infinity swimming pool that gives way to a gorgeous view of the distant hills. The party will be a Diwali celebration as well as a housewarming. Priyanka and her husband of three years, Nick Jonas, bought the place for a reported $20 million at the end of 2019, just before the pandemic forced everyone inside. They spent their first six months together doing what some of us did in those early, unsteady days: eating pizza every night, watching movies at four in the morning, sleeping in. Since then, though, they’ve had to be largely apart, working in different parts of the world. “I want to be at home,” Priyanka tells me. “I’ve been away for almost a year now.” At the moment, her husband is occupied upstairs. “We both have a shoot today. So that’s the thing about this house—both him and I have had 20-year careers, and I think we finally built a home that accommodates our individual lives.”

Hosting tomorrow night’s party will allow Priyanka to do something she does exceedingly well: make people feel welcome. Many of the friends and collaborators I talk to about her note her ability to put anyone at ease, and I feel it almost immediately. Priyanka’s wearing a casual plaid navy shirtdress and sandals, her long hair still damp from the shower. In person, she is warm and charming, with a ready laugh and engaging eyes. She moves from deep conversation to light jokes with ease. “She can come across as so regal and refined, which she certainly is, but she’s also got this carefree joy about her and she just exudes it,” says her husband. “She’s an incredible host in that way. I’m more of a reserved person at first, and I open up with friends and people as I get to know them better, but she can make you feel like you are in the family and a part of the inner circle right away.”

Jada Pinkett Smith, who starred in The Matrix Resurrections with Priyanka, puts it this way: “She’s just a ball of light. She’s funny and she’s witty, and she just enjoys life. It’s magnetic.”

Behind that light and magnetism, of course, is a driven woman who has transcended what’s previously been possible for an Indian actor in Hollywood. After becoming one of the biggest movie stars in India, Priyanka left home at the peak of her Bollywood career and created, step-by-step, a career in America that’s reaching new heights. Last year, she published her memoir, Unfinished (now a New York Times best seller); launched her hair-care line, Anomaly; raised millions of dollars to aid India during the pandemic; opened an Indian restaurant in New York; and starred in the Matrix sequel. Later this year—with the rom-com Text for You and Amazon’s ambitious spy series Citadel—Priyanka will finally be playing lead film roles as she had in India. It’s a moment she has been building toward for 20 years. She is an outsider who broke down barriers and built a place for herself within the walls of Hollywood. Now she’s on a mission to welcome others in.

“It’s taken a lot of pavement pounding to be able to get people’s attention, and to be able to get an acceptance of the fact that someone like me can be the lead of a Hollywood feature,” she says. “There’s very few of us from South Asia who get to do that. I hope that the part that I play in it will sort of push the envelope a little bit.”

Priyanka, who’s 39, has already lived many lives. She was born in India—her parents were military physicians—then moved to the U.S. as a teenager to live with her aunt. Routinely bullied for being Indian, Priyanka returned to India after three years to finish her high school education at the Army Public School in Bareilly. In 1999, her mother and brother entered her in her first pageant, and she went on to win Miss India World and ultimately Miss World 2000. Within 10 years of launching her Bollywood career, she became one of the most successful actors working in India’s massive movie industry, the world’s largest producer of films, with billions of tickets sold a year. Priyanka often shot multiple films simultaneously. She became insanely famous. Can’t-walk-down-the-street famous. It was then that her manager, Anjula Acharia, urged her to move back to the U.S. to pursue a music career with the legendary record executive Jimmy Iovine.

Other Hindi film stars had tried to break into the U.S. market, but none achieved anything like the same stardom. “I wasn’t looking to do work in America,” Priyanka tells me. “I was at this amazing point in my career. I was doing critically acclaimed work and winning awards. So she called me, and I kind of laughed at the idea.” In the end, she took the leap and signed a record deal with Universal Music Group. Priyanka became the first Bollywood star ever signed at CAA and released a few singles, collaborating with Pitbull and will.i.am. “It was just magical,” she says. “So those three, four years just went by. I was being serenaded by this rock-and-roll lifestyle.”

It was booking the lead role of FBI trainee Alex Parrish in the ABC series Quantico in 2015 that allowed Priyanka to move from a fledgling music career back into acting. “Quantico for me was a really big win,” she says. “Not just because of being the first time an Indian or South Asian actor was lead of a network show, but, more than that, because I was not put in the box, like the show wasn’t My Big Fat Indian Wedding.”

The Parrish character was written without a specific ethnicity in mind, which is something Priyanka had longed for: She didn’t want to be pigeonholed for being Indian or cast as a trope. Once she’d won the role, she added some touches from her own background, including speaking Hindi on the show. “After that, I just started looking for parts like that, where my ethnicity is something that is an asset [but] I’m not defined by it.” Priyanka was the first South Asian actor to win a People’s Choice Award for the role—she won two—and when Quantico wrapped after three seasons in 2018, she had already begun appearing in a smattering of films, playing a vampy villain in Baywatch, a yoga instructor in the comedy Isn’t It Romantic, and a fiercely determined mother in the family drama The Sky Is Pink. The last of these was produced by Purple Pebble Pictures, which Priyanka cofounded with her mother, Madhu Chopra. The company has a TV deal with Amazon, and Priyanka says she’s focused on telling predominantly South Asian stories and ones centered on women: “I’m looking at doing very hyper-specific storytelling.” As for the responsibility that comes with representing South Asians in her work, she adds, “I may make my mistakes, because this is not a mantle I was looking for. But I think collectively, each one of us can push Hollywood, and push the powers that be, and be demanding and not just polite about it. I’ve been polite for a very long time. Now it’s time to say, ‘I’m sorry, that doesn’t work,’ and to fight for your characters. As a producer, I’m so grateful that I get the opportunity to do that, to be able to make stories and look for stories that normalize different cultures of the world.”

Last year, Priyanka executive produced and starred in The White Tiger, an adaptation of an Aravind Adiga novel exploring India’s caste systems through the experience of one wealthy family’s driver. “When she sets her mind to accomplish something, which could be producing a film, it could be her business ventures—she’s relentless,” says the film’s writer-director, Ramin Bahrani, whose screenplay was nominated for an Oscar. “And when it comes to the performance, she’s the same. Lots of questions. And all good questions. Great instincts.”

When I ask Priyanka how the roles she’s looking for have changed, she pauses. “I’m scared to say this,” she says. I encourage her to go on. “When I first came here, to get the attention, I had to sort of shed my ethnicity a lot more so that it was not alien,” she says. “I had to play parts which were more American to get a seat at the table. Now that I’ve got a seat at the table, I’ve reverted back to playing parts that embrace my ethnicity.”

Midway through my conversation with Priyanka, I start to see flashes out of the corner of my eye: Nick’s photo shoot is under way just up the stairs. The game room is partly a shrine to music. The walls are hung with big vintage rock photos: the Rolling Stones onstage, the Beatles arriving at an airport to a crush of reporters, Kurt Cobain in a reflective moment. At the far end of the room, there’s an upright piano and an acoustic guitar lying on a couch, along with an old arcade-style Pac-Man machine.

There’s an absurd narrative about Priyanka and her husband that sometimes slithers into view, implying that she married Jonas, who’s 10 years younger, to get more famous. In 2018—shortly after the couple’s glam multiday wedding in a palace in Jodhpur, India—The Cut actually ran a piece accusing Priyanka of being a “scam artist” who had somehow ensnared the singer. The piece received the trashing it deserved for being sexist and xenophobic and was eventually taken down with an apology from the outlet. For the record, Priyanka is much more successful globally, with twice as many Instagram followers as Jonas, for starters (71.5 million to his 31.8 million). She’s starred in more than 50 films, won India’s version of the Oscar for the 2008 drama Fashion, and been on the cover of Vogue India 11 times. Priyanka doesn’t trot these stats out herself, obviously—she’s in love with the guy, not competing with him—but it’s clear that the ignorance about who she is, and what she’s accomplished, rankles every so often. In March 2021, when the couple was about to host the Oscar nominations announcement, an Australian journalist tweeted, “No disrespect to these two but I’m not sure their contribution to the movies qualifies them to be announcing Oscar nominees.” Enough already. Priyanka responded, “Would love your thoughts on what qualifies someone. Here are my 60+ film credentials for your adept consideration.” She included a link to her IMDB page. “I usually don’t get mad, but that just pissed me off,” she tells me now.

Priyanka is the first to acknowledge how much the U.S. has inspired and supported her, but there are challenges that have come with diving into a new market and culture. In those early days on these shores, she humbled herself when she met with studio executives or magazine editors; she explained who she was back in India. But now, being dismissed can sting. “I’ll be mad, I’ll be angry, I’ll be annoyed,” Priyanka says. “I’ll speak about it to my family. I might cry a little bit, but it doesn’t change my relationship with my work and what my actual quest is. My quest is not people’s opinions. My quest is my job. My quest is making sure that when someone watches something that I have done, it moves them or they enjoy it. My personal life, who I am, all of that is not my job.”

Her personal life, of course, remains under a microscope nonetheless. On a random Monday in November, Priyanka changed her Instagram handle to just her first name, and the infernal machine known as the internet decided that it meant trouble for her marriage. Then she responded to a video that Jonas had posted with lusty comment and cute emojis, and the world was soothed. All this happened during a 12-hour period on just one day of her life. “It’s a very vulnerable feeling, actually, that if I post a picture, everything that’s behind me in that picture is going to be zoomed in on, and people are going to speculate,” Priyanka says. “It’s just a professional hazard…. Because of the noise of social media, because of the prevalence that it has in our lives, I think it seems a lot larger than it is. I think that we give it a lot more credence in real life, and I don’t think it needs that.”

One recent social media backlash flared up when *The Activist—*a new reality competition show that Priyanka may judge—was criticized for pitting activists against each other. “I have no idea what they’re going to do with it yet,” she says now, adding that the producers have gone back to the drawing board to retool the show. “I’ve been involved with Global Citizen for so many years, and I know the strides that they’ve made when it comes to global poverty and climate change. They’ve done incredible work. So, it’s really tragic when something like that happens because that is never the intention.” Again, I can see the frustration work its way under her skin. “It makes me sad because I try to live my life as a good person every day, doing the best I can, just like everyone else. And it would just be nice to be seen for that sometimes.”

Jonas tells me he’s never seen his wife get overwhelmed by the pressures of fame. “We both know that public life is something that comes with what we do,” he says. “But we’ve set real boundaries around our personal lives, our privacy, and worked really hard to create that little safe haven for ourselves with our friends and family.”

That safe haven includes a tight circle of loved ones. Even while I’m visiting their home, Jonas’s family is upstairs, in town for the Diwali party. Priyanka jokes that her mother—who lived with her and Jonas after COVID-19 cases skyrocketed in India—pushed her to launch her production company when she was turning 30 by telling her, “ ‘Oh, my God, you’re not going to have an acting career anymore because everybody wants to work with a younger one. So we need a business.’ ” Her mother, she adds lovingly, has eased up recently. “Her attention is diverted by my marriage. She’s very much an Asian mom, very excited about the fact that I finally did it.” She laughs. “She had no hope.”

Presumably her mother also hopes for a grandchild? “They’re a big part of our desire for the future,” says Priyanka. “By God’s grace, when it happens, it happens.” I point out that both their lives seem busier than ever. “No, we’re not too busy to practice,” she says. I laugh and clarify that I wasn’t talking about sex but rather about their breakneck pace with work. They will have to slow down when a child enters their lives.

“I’m okay with that,” she says. “We’re both okay with that.”

The next time I speak to Priyanka, she’s in an entirely different place, both physically and mentally. It’s three weeks later, and she has returned to London to shoot the epic action series Citadel. She’s working nights and jokes that she’s still on L.A. time despite the new location. She is alone instead of in a busy home filled with family and friends.

Amazon aims to make Citadel a global action franchise, with Priyanka and Richard Madden starring in the “mother ship” series, followed by spin-offs in Italy, India, Spain, and Mexico. The show has demanded months of her time and energy. Among other things, she will get to speak six languages in it. Later this year, Priyanka will also have her first lead role in a Hollywood feature film, Text for You. “I’m such a sucker for a good romantic comedy, like a date-night movie that makes your heart go soft,” Priyanka says.

To understand the variety of projects on Priyanka’s plate right now, you just have to remember the goal that gleams up ahead: to build a career as varied as the one she had in India. There, Priyanka played an Olympic boxer, an autistic teen, a femme fatale, a general’s wife, and a model. In the 2009 comedy What’s Your Raashee?, she played 12 different characters. “People here haven’t seen her in a diverse set of roles like they have in India,” says Acharia, Priyanka’s manager. “I see her like Julia Roberts. We saw Julia Roberts in comedy, and then we saw her strip down for Erin Brockovich. For Pri, what’s exciting is how people respond when they see who she really is.”

Priyanka echoes the sentiment. “I think as an actor, it’ll be a really crucial time for me,” she says. “I want to do movies that are not always bright and shiny. I want to be able to unravel as an artist onscreen, I want to work under the tutelage of really brilliant minds. And I want to be pushed. I’m ready to be pushed.”

This year, Priyanka will also shoot an untitled comedy with Mindy Kaling that she and Kaling developed together. “That one is a really big piece of my heart for many reasons,” she says of the film, which was inspired by her wedding and the uniting of her Indian culture and Jonas’s American one. “I remember when Universal bought it in the room. We held hands under the table. Because I was like, I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen a buddy comedy with two brown people.”

There are even more projects in the works. Priyanka is developing Sheela for Amazon, in which she’ll play Ma Anand Sheela, the spiritual adviser made famous in the Wild Wild Country documentary for her part in the 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack in Oregon. And she will return to India to film her first Hindi project in a number of years, a road movie centered on three women, which will also star two other Bollywood actors, Katrina Kaif and Alia Bhatt.

But I sense a push and pull in Priyanka that seems new to her. She’s close to capturing the Hollywood career she’s always dreamed of, but—like many women at the top of their field who have chosen to prioritize their mental health—she clearly doesn’t want to spend all of 2022 grinding herself into the ground, or being alone in an empty London apartment, working nights. “I’ve always been such a worker bee,” she says. “My priority has always been the next job. I’m a very, very ambitious person. But I think the woman in me is craving balance. I’m craving my family life. I’m craving being able to do things for the soul that I didn’t do because I was just ‘blinders on’ and working.”

Priyanka admits that her path has left her with some bruises and scars. “I think maybe that’s why I’m becoming a lot more introverted as I go along on this journey in the entertainment business now,” she tells me. “I’m starting to protect myself a lot more because I realize how much it takes out of you. It takes a part of your soul, constantly trying to make sure that you say the right thing, do the right thing, dress the right way, not make a mistake, not trip because the whole world is going to watch. Or not fall when you’re walking up on a red carpet or say something wrong or have a bad fucking day.”

Priyanka knows 2022 is going to bring change. “I feel like I am at a precipice of reinvention,” she says. “What is the new me? I’m very excited about the future. I’m terrified of it too. Change is always scary. But I’ve done it multiple times in my life.”

This time, she intends to care for herself as much as she does for her career. “When does this article come out?” she asks as our time wraps up. I tell her that it’s the February issue. “That’s what I want to do. By the time this piece comes out, that’s what I will be doing.”

I believe her.

Hair by Shon Hyungsun Ju. Makeup by Lisa Eldridge. Manicure
by Michelle Humphrey. Tailor, Michelle Warner. Set design by Sean Thomson. Produced on location by Shiny Projects. Styled by Leith Clark. Photographed exclusively for V.F. by Emma Summerton in London. For details, go to VF.com/credits.

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