Priyanka received equal pay just once in her 20-year career

Mumbai, Dec. 8 (IANS): Actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas revealed in an interview that her upcoming Amazon Prime Video series ‘Citadel’ is the first time she’s ever received equal pay as her male co-stars. She has been acting for 20 years.

“I’ve never had pay parity in Bollywood,” Priyanka said in an interview for BBC’s 100 Women (via The Independent).

“I would get paid about 10 per cent of the salary of my male co-actor. (The pay gap) is 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],” she added. “We’ve asked, but we’ve not got it.”

Priyanka detailed other ways in which she contended against sexism while working on Bollywood productions. “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,” she said.

“I was called ‘black cat’ and ‘dusky.’ I mean, what does ‘dusky’ even mean in a country where we are literally all brown?” Chopra Jonas continued. “I thought I was not pretty enough, I believed that I would have to work a lot harder, even though I thought I was probably a little bit more talented than my fellow actors who were lighter skinned.”

Amazon Prime Video’s upcoming ‘Citadel’ hails from ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ directors Joe and Anthony Russo and features an ensemble cast that is headlined by Priyanka and Richard Madden.

The show is billed as an “action-packed spy series” that spans the globe, and it’s being designed to launch spinoff series set in India, Spain Mexico and more.