Actor Priyanka Chopra joined veteran actor Kabir Bedi over a video call to launch his upcoming memoir, Stories I Must Tell. During the conversation, they spoke about how tough it was for them to make headways into Hollywood. Speaking about finding roles in Hollywood as an Indian actor, Kabir said he had to look for anything that seemed foreign to the American audience. “In those days Hollywood just wasn’t writing roles for Indian or Asians in general. So how do you get a role if it is not written for you? When they did have a role for an Asian, they had no hesitation in painting a white actor brown. The way I got the roles was telling my agent that forgets the Indian bit. Cast me in anything that is foreign-looking to Hollywood,” he said in the video by Bollywood Hungama.
Priyanka interjected, “But let me tell you. This is a couple of decades later when I decided to go and seek work in America. I didn’t have to change my name but I did have to teach people how to say my name. Everybody would be like Priyanka Shapra-Shapra. I said it is not Shapra. If you can say Oprah, you can say Chopra. It’s not that difficult. What I had to do as well– so funny that you are saying you had to do at that time — was I had to be ethnically ambiguous to a certain extent, to be able to get mainstream roles. In Quantico, I played a half-Indian, half-American. All my bigger work when I initially joined Hollywood.”
