Priyanka Chopra Jonas remembers when she was a teenager watching Sarah Michelle Gellar in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in her native India — and later, when she moved to the U.S. for high school.
“I was like, ‘That’s who I want to be,’” Chopra Jonas, 37, tells Variety. “She was an amazing teenage idol. But what if at 13, I had seen someone who looked like me? The only person that I saw at that time who was culturally representative of me was Apu from ‘The Simpsons,’ and he was played by a white guy, which I found out much later, obviously. But as a teenager, I didn’t see representation of myself in American pop culture or even global pop culture outside of the stereotypical caricatures of South Asians.”
Over the course of her U.S. career, Chopra Jonas has aimed to course-correct Hollywood’s treatment of South Asian actors and people behind the scenes.
“I was like, ‘That’s who I want to be,’” Chopra Jonas, 37, tells Variety. “She was an amazing teenage idol. But what if at 13, I had seen someone who looked like me? The only person that I saw at that time who was culturally representative of me was Apu from ‘The Simpsons,’ and he was played by a white guy, which I found out much later, obviously. But as a teenager, I didn’t see representation of myself in American pop culture or even global pop culture outside of the stereotypical caricatures of South Asians.”
Over the course of her U.S. career, Chopra Jonas has aimed to course-correct Hollywood’s treatment of South Asian actors and people behind the scenes.
- 6/30/2020
- by Marc Malkin
- Variety Film + TV
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