Actress Priyanka Chopra has said that she got paid as much as her male co-star for the first time in her 22-year-long career for doing the upcoming Amazon Prime Video series Citadel.
"I’ve been working in the entertainment industry for 22 years, and I have done about 70-plus features and two TV shows. But when I did Citadel, it was the first time in my career that I had pay parity," Priyanka said at the South by Southwest Film Festival on Friday, according to US-based entertainment magazine The Hollywood Reporter.
The 40-year-old Indian-origin actress also discussed how she put in the same amount of investment and work, but was paid much less in her previous projects.
Amazon Studios decided to pay the Citadel co-stars — Priyanka and Richard Madden — the same amount which resulted in Priyanka realising that it's only fair for her to be paid equally.
"I wonder: Did that happen because there are very few female decision-makers in Hollywood? Would that have been a different conversation if a woman didn’t make that decision? Those are not conversations that happened very easily,” the Quantico star said in the interaction.
Priyanka also talked about her experience with being body-shamed before the commencement of the film festival. “I arrived feeling crappy because somebody told me yesterday I wasn’t sample sized."
The actress was so hurt by the statement that she discussed the issue with her family as well as her husband, Nick Jonas, and her team. "I felt really bad about the fact I’m not sample-sized and that that’s a problem, apparently. Most of us are not. ‘Sample-sized’ is a size 2,” Priyanka said.
Priyanka will be playing the role of Nadia Sinh, a combat-trained spy with memory loss in Citadel. She also shared a clip from the upcoming thriller series, showing a fun interaction between Nadia and Mason Kane (Richard Madden) as she tries to make sense of what her co-spy is telling her. While dealing with memory loss, Nadia accidentally touches a briefcase that shows her spy identity leaving her flabbergasted.
The series, directed by the Russo Brothers, is set for an April 28 premiere with two episodes debuting on the same day followed by a new episode dropping every Friday.
