Speak up against pay parity and ill treatment

I used to earn 10% of my male co-actor’s salary: Priyanka Chopra, who is on the BBC’s ‘100 Women’ list of influential figures of the year, has opened up about the sexism and body shaming she’s faced in her career. Excerpts:

ON PAY PARITY

I’ve never had pay parity in Bollywood. I’d get paid about 10% of the salary of my male co-actor. It (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). We’ve asked, but we’ve not got it. . .

The first time it (equal pay) happened to me was in Hollywood (for the upcoming US show Citadel). So I don’t know going forward (if it will be the same), because this was my first show with a male actor as a co-lead.

ON LATE-COMING OF MALE CO-ACTOR

I thought it was absolutely okay 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.

ON BEING CALLED ‘DUSKY’

I was called ‘black cat’, ‘dusky’. I mean, what does ‘dusky’ even mean in a country where we are literally all brown? 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. But I thought that was right because it was so normalised.

ON BEING AN ASIAN IN HOLLYWOOD

I’d go into meetings by myself, introduce myself and take my show reel. I worked with acting and dialect coaches. I did auditions, got rejected, cried, then went back for another one. It was a humbling experience. . . I think maybe I’ve built a certain amount of credibility, and so I’m doing interesting work, (but) it’s really hard to be South Asian and Indian in Hollywood. There’s still a long way to go.