Priyanka Chopra weighs in on pay disparity and body shaming in Bollywood

Priyanka Chopra has recently revealed that the first time she received equal salary to her male co-actor for her role in upcoming Hollywood movie Citadel.

The global star told BBC 100 Women that in her 22-year career and doing over 60 movies in Bollywood, she was always paid less than her male co-stars.

“I've never had pay parity in Bollywood. I would get paid about 10% of the salary of my male co-actor,” said the Quantico actress

The Baywatch star continued, “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,” stated the 40-year-old.

PeeCee also recounted days where patriarchy was accepted as “normal” in the Indian movie industry.

One of the prime examples was she thought “it was absolutely OK 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”.

Not only that, PeeCee also pointed out she’d faced body shaming mainly because of Bollywood’s obsession with fair skin.

“I was called black cat, dusky. I mean, what does dusky even mean in a country where we are literally all brown?” remarked the Bajirao Mastani actress.

The actress noted, “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.”

However, “it is up to our generation to be able to cut those ties and change it so that the next generation doesn't inherit the equity placed on light skin,” remarked the Dil Dhadakne Do star.

Being a superstar in Bollywood, PeeCee shared that it’s tough for her to carve a niche for herself in Hollywood especially due to her “ethnicity”.

The Sky Is Pink actress mentioned, “I think maybe I've built a certain amount of credibility, and so I'm doing interesting work. We'll see if that's accepted or not.”

“It's really hard to be South Asian and Indian in Hollywood. There's still a long way to go,” she added.