Priyanka Chopra Jonas: two industries and no fixed address

From the Miss World stage to a Telugu epic with S. S. Rajamouli, by way of three seasons of American network TV and a Prime Video spy franchise that exists, in part, because she did. The Bollywood–Hollywood split was a script she rewrote on the way through.

Few performers have spent as much of their career inside the contradiction Priyanka Chopra Jonas has lived in. Bollywood expects exclusivity; Hollywood does not always know what to do with stars formed elsewhere; streaming wants a global face but rarely funds the kind of role one is built around. She has done all three at once, on purpose, for almost a decade. Citadel arrives in its second season on May 6, her latest Hollywood franchise as co-lead, and she is currently in Antarctica filming her first Telugu role — Rajamouli’s directorial scale, the language she has not yet acted in. There is a working theory of her career that says she keeps choosing between markets. The actual practice has been to refuse the choice every time.

She was born in Jamshedpur to two Indian Army doctors and grew up moving between Lucknow, Bareilly and three American addresses — Newton in Massachusetts, then Cedar Rapids in Iowa, then back to school in India before college in Mumbai. The plan, she has said, was to study aeronautical engineering or criminal psychology. The Miss World crown of 2000 changed the plan. She was the fifth Indian woman to take the title and the fourth in seven years, arriving at the tail end of an Indian beauty-pageant moment that had become an export industry of its own.

The first Bollywood years were the unglamorous ones. The 2002 Tamil film Thamizhan was the debut, the 2003 spy thriller The Hero: Love Story of a Spy was the Hindi entry, and most of the 2004 releases came and went. Aitraaz the same year was the corrective: a courtroom thriller in which she played the antagonist accusing her employee of harassment, and she has since described it as the biggest learning of her early career. By the second half of the decade she was inside the box-office machinery — Krrish and Don in 2006, both top-grossers and both with sequels she eventually returned to — and then Fashion arrived in 2008. The role of a model whose career and self-image collapse in step with each other won her the National Film Award for Best Actress and changed the kind of part she was offered.

The decade between Fashion and Quantico is the stretch of her filmography that critics cite when arguing she is, in fact, an actress before she is a brand. Kaminey in 2009 with Vishal Bhardwaj, twelve distinct characters in What’s Your Raashee? the same year, the serial killer in Bhardwaj’s 7 Khoon Maaf in 2011, the autistic protagonist in Anurag Basu’s Barfi! in 2012, the eponymous boxer in Mary Kom in 2014, Kashibai in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Bajirao Mastani in 2015, the elder daughter in Zoya Akhtar’s Dil Dhadakne Do that same year. Five Filmfare Awards came out of that run. So did the 2016 Padma Shri.

Quantico, which premiered on ABC in 2015 and ran three seasons, made her the first South Asian woman to lead an American primetime network drama. The role — FBI recruit Alex Parrish — was the kind of breakthrough that did not have an obvious precedent and did not produce a clean follow-up. Baywatch in 2017 was the size of opportunity she could plausibly take and the kind of film that taught most of its cast the limits of size. Isn’t It Romantic and The Sky Is Pink in 2019 were the recalibration; the latter she also produced, and her performance as Aditi Chaudhary, the mother of a teenager living with a terminal illness, is the kind of work the Quantico-era press tour did not always make room for.

The criticism that has trailed her crossover years is precise: she has often been brought into Hollywood projects that did not fully imagine the lead they hired her for. The White Tiger in 2021 — Ramin Bahrani’s adaptation of Aravind Adiga’s Booker-winning novel, which she also executive produced — was a partial answer to that. Citadel in 2023 was the more ambitious one. The Russo brothers’ Prime Video spy series gave her, alongside Richard Madden, a global lead role inside a franchise designed to run regional spin-offs in India and Italy. Reception of the first season was mixed; the second arrives globally on May 6 in more than 240 territories, with a darker tone the trailers have already announced.

She started Purple Pebble Pictures in 2015 and used it to fund regional Indian-language work the marquee studios were not making — the Marathi comedy-drama Ventilator in 2016, the Marathi environmental drama Paani that won the National Film Award for best film on environment conservation when it eventually released theatrically in 2024. The 2021 memoir Unfinished was a New York Times bestseller. Her beauty company Anomaly was acquired by Reliance Retail earlier this year, the first major Indian platform deal she has executed against her own brand. She has been a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2010.

She married the American singer Nick Jonas in December 2018 in two ceremonies at Umaid Bhawan Palace in Jodhpur. Their daughter Malti Marie was born by surrogate in January 2022 and spent the first hundred days of her life in a neonatal ICU.

The next move is the one that complicates the diagnosis. Varanasi, which she is currently filming in Antarctic locations, is her debut in Telugu — a major-budget S. S. Rajamouli production with Mahesh Babu and Prithviraj Sukumaran, scheduled for Ram Navami 2027. She has been a Hindi actress, an English actress, an American TV actress and a Prime Video spy. She has not, until now, been a Telugu one. The career has spent two decades organising itself around the refusal to settle into a single industry. There is no obvious sign that she means to start now.