Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra Jonas says she has only received equal pay once in her 20-year career
Bollywood star Priyanka Chopra Jonas has opened up about the sexism she's faced in the film industry.
The Indian actress, 40, who has been in front of a camera for two decades, she's received equal pay just once in her career.
She made the revelation about her salary to the BBC 100 Women, explaining that she received a fraction of her male co-stars' salaries in Bollywood.
Her upcoming Amazon Prime series, Citadel, sees the actress step into the shoes of Nadia Singh in what's being billed as an 'action-packed spy series with a compelling emotional centre.'
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"I've never had pay parity in Bollywood," Jonas admitted. "I would get paid about 10 percent 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."
Unfortunately, this is far from the only incident of sexism that the actress has experienced in her career, and she claimed that male actors are allowed to work on their own schedule.
"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.
As if all this wasn't already bad enough, the actress claims that she was also called demeaning names, which affected her personal confidence.
"I was called 'black cat' and 'dusky.' I mean, what does 'dusky' even mean in a country where we are literally all brown?" she added.
"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."
However, despite the troubles she's faced in her career, the actress ultimately described herself as a 'lucky one' because she has the ability to stand up for herself.
"People around the world get killed for it," she said.
The 40-year-old found herself in the spotlight after winning Miss World in 2000, which makes her comments about how the film industry affected her self-esteem all the more shocking.
She explained that while she has tried to use her celebrity platform for good, she finds that social media can be 'a lot sometimes'.
"You can just never be good enough on social media [either]. No matter what you do, there will always be people who say you did this wrong."
Topics: Celebrity
Emma Guinness