Actress Priyanka Chopra says she had been advised in her early days to get a boob job done if she wanted to become an actress in Bollywood. The 38-year-old actress, who was crowned Miss World in 2000, has recalled the incident in her autobiography Unfinished. Priyanka shared that the first person she met suggested that she should fix her 'proportions', and her then-manager agreed with the idea.
"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," she wrote in the book.
"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," she added.
The actress continued: "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."
Recalling the situation she found herself in, Priyanka 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."
She added: "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," she added.
