Actress Priyanka Chopra opened up in a recent interview about how she faced pay disparity during her early days in the Hindi-film industry. She also spoke about the privileges that male actors got on the film sets. Recently the actress made it to the BBC’s ‘100 Women’ list for 2022, making her one of the four Indians to be named on the list.
“I've never had pay parity in Bollywood. I would get paid about 10% of the salary of my male co-actor. It's (the pay gap) 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,” Priyanka said in the interview.
She also shared that she would be treated differently from her male co-stars on the sets and how she thought it to be a normal thing. She said, “I 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.”
Priyanka said that she found things to be different in Hollywood. She added that her upcoming project, Citadel, will be the first time she has a male co-lead in Hollywood. “Well, the first time it's happened to me, it has happened in Hollywood. So I don't know going forward,” she said.
Citadel is an upcoming Tv-series that has been created by Patrick Moran and the Russo Brothers. The show stars Richard Madden as the male lead and will stream on Amazon Prime Video. The Fashion actress will also be seen in films like Ending Things, It's All Coming Back to Me, and Farhan Akhtar’s Hindi-language production, Jee Le Zaraa. According to sources, the shooting for Jee Le Zaraa will start soon and the film is expected to be released in the summer of 2023.