Superstar Priyanka Chopra admits that she took up the role of Mary Kom, the 2014 film on the eponymous Olympic medal winning boxer from Manipur, because “I was just greedy as an actor to get a chance to tell her story.”
In an interview with Vanity Fair magazine, Chopra admitted that someone from the northeast should have got the role.
“When I played Mary Kom, I was very sceptical taking it on in the beginning because she was a living, breathing icon and she made place for so many female athletes,” she said. “Plus, I look nothing like her. She comes from the northeast of India and I am from northern India and we physically didn’t look alike. In hindsight, the part should have probably gone to someone from the northeast.”
She met Kom and spent time with her. “I met her children and I met her husband. I had to spend almost five months training to learn the sport, which is not easy, by the way,” admitted Chopra. “And to physically alter my body as well, to get into an athlete’s shape. Physically, it was really tough. Mentally, it was really tough.”
While Chopra got many awards for the role of Kom, there was also criticism from some, who said she was the wrong choice and the producers should have opted for an actress from the northeast.
Referring to the rumours in November of a rift with her husband Nick Jonas, Chopra said: “It’s a very vulnerable feeling, actually, that if I post a picture, everything that’s behind me in that picture is going to be zoomed in on, and people are going to speculate. It’s just a professional hazard.”
And because of the noise of social media and “the prevalence that it has in our lives, I think it seems a lot larger than it is. I think that we give it a lot more credence in real life, and I don’t think it needs that.”
