Newsmaker: Priyanka Chopra

The Indian superstar has moved into the American consciousness as the lead in the new TV drama Quantico, becoming the first Bollywood A-lister to take such a high-profile leap.

Kagan McLeod for The National

Quantico is the first major American television drama that will star a bona fide Bollywood superstar. It's a huge moment for fans of Indian actors, who for years have seen their stars viewed as second-class citizens by Hollywood. But now the cat is well and truly out of the bag that Indian actors are more than song-and-dance merchants.

Yet the decision to cast Priyanka Chopra in the lead comes with risks – no one knows if Americans will take to a television drama starring a principal protagonist who was born in Jamshedpur. Or whether it will be enough for ABC, the American television channel behind the show, if Quantico is a huge hit in India, where it will be broadcast almost simultaneously.

The 33-year-old Chopra has been cast in the lead role of Alex Parrish, who is part of a group of FBI recruits training at the bureau's academy in Quantico, Virginia. The actress is by far the biggest name in a cast that also includes the Palestinian actress Yasmine Al Masri. The show has been described as "Grey's Anatomy meets Homeland".

The press were only given the pilot episode to preview, but already its star is getting rave reviews. "Chopra is the show's primary asset," said David Wiegand of the San Francisco Chronicle. "She's perfectly suited to play the part of a tough young woman who is driven by events in her own past."

“I’m used to playing the hot chick and doing action,” Chopra once told me in an interview about her early Bollywood career. “I wouldn’t say it was boring. How can I be an actress without looking good or hot?”

Such a rationale explains why Indian producers are so quick to give roles to Indians who have won the Miss World pageant, and it was in winning the title in 2000 that Chopra embarked on the road to superstardom. She became the fifth Indian to win the coveted title, and like Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, who won the title in 1994, she took to acting like a fish to water.

However, she told Entertainment Weekly she was more like a deer in the headlights. "When I won Miss World, I wasn't even 18, and I thought of it as a day at the races or something. I didn't understand the magnitude of it for a couple of years. A couple of months before that, I was in 12th grade in school uniform, and from that I went on to modelling with the biggest designers, travelling the world, and sitting in front of the world press talking about the economy of Zimbabwe, and I'm like, what am I talking about?"

One of the remarkable things about Chopra, and certainly what appeals to fans, is that she has a down-to-earth, self-effacing demeanour. Her parents were both physicians in the Indian army, which caused her to move from base to base throughout her childhood. Her most formative years were spent living with her aunt in the United States. “I went to high school in America,” she says. “I went at 13 and came back at 17. I’m kind of nomadic, I think.”

At school in Massachusetts, she participated in theatre productions, classical music and Kathak dance. So it's perhaps no surprise that she doesn't see the US as a big challenge – it's easier than the feeling she had of being an outsider as a teenager. In an interview with the International Business Times in 2012, she recalled being bullied and called "Browny" at high school. "My life was an epitome of imperfection. I'm not perfect like Aishwarya Rai – beautiful, stunning. I was a gawky kid, had low self-esteem, came from a modest middle-class background, had white marks on my legs, but the only thing I knew was to work hard and learn. I didn't know how to act or win a beauty pageant," she said. "But I was damn hard-working. Today, my legs sell 12 brands."

The constant moving around also made her something of a chameleon, and it’s an ability to adapt that she brings to the characters she plays. It also helps explain why she can’t sit still. “I get bored doing the same thing,” she told me in 2012. “I built my career trying to do everything that I can, doing different parts and doing different things. The fact is that I wanted to be an engineer, and then an actress. Music is another thing. Universal pushed me to do an album and I’m slowly learning how to become a musician.”

The songs were largely sung in English. Her single In My City featured the rapper will.i.am, and debuted before an American football show, while she went on to record two further singles, including Exotic with the chart rapper Pitbull.

During this time, she was also making strategic inroads into the American consciousness, as she became the first Bollywood star to sign with the Los Angeles-based Creative Artists Agency. Then she voiced the love interest Ishani in Pixar's Planes.

In addition to these pursuits, she also proved herself adept at journalism, writing more than 50 opinion pieces for India's Hindustan Times in The Priyanka Chopra Column. The column was full of personal anecdotes from her career and musings on Indian society. In 2014, as a Unicef national ambassador promoting child rights, she wrote an article for The Guardian in the United Kingdom about female genital mutilation and child marriage. Chopra has collaborated with Unicef since 2008, and has spoken out on issues from anaemia to women's empowerment. She recorded a series of public service announcements pushing for girls' education and participated in a media panel promoting children's rights.

Chopra's media savvy is also evident on her Twitter feed, where she has 11.1 million followers; her Facebook page has 16.7 million "likes". The Huffington Post named her the most influential Indian woman on Twitter. She has tweeted more than 15,000 times, and sees this as the best way to keep in touch with her fans. Although, remarkably, she manages to keep her private life a mystery. "For me, Twitter has always been an extension of myself. If I wanted to say something I say it. The idea of social networking is for people to get to know each other and not to be judged for everything you say."

What Chopra doesn't mind being judged on are her performances. She has grown into acting. When, in 2002, she made her debut as the love interest of an upstanding lawyer in the Tamil movie Thamizhan, her reviews were decidedly mixed. It was a year later, in Hindi cinema, that Chopra began to find success, winning a Filmfare Award for Best Female Debut for her turn in Andaaz. Yet this proved a false dawn, as she found herself typecast as the glamour girl in films that flopped.

Things changed when she decided to test her acting chops in Aitraaz portraying Soniya Roy, a woman who accuses her boss of sexual harassment. Although the film was only a moderate success, Chopra received rave reviews for the first time in her career. Jay Mamtora wrote for the BBC: "Aitraaz is Priyanka Chopra's film. As the deliciously wicked, gold-digging, scheming seductress, she chews up every scene she is in with her magnetic screen presence."

Rave receptions were still the exception rather than the norm, but despite numerous critical failures between 2005 and 2008, there were silver linings, in the shape of her appearances in two megahits, the superhero drama Krrish and the crime thriller Don, in which she was cast opposite the Indian superstar Shah Rukh Khan. She was finding success in genre films using action rather than as romantic leads.

She really established herself as a superstar actress in 2008 with two films in which she played characters in the fashion industry, parts where it was easy to see a former Miss World excel. The first, Fashion, followed the lives of several women in the fashion industry. Then came Dostana, in which Chopra proved that she could also be a romantic lead, playing a fashion-magazine editor who shares an apartment with two men (Abhishek Bachchan and John Abraham).

The tide had turned, and roles in What's Your Raashee? (2009), 7 Khoon Maaf (2011), Don 2 (2011), Barfi! (2012) and Mary Kom (2014) confirmed her status as the most powerful actress in India. She also became the first Indian actress to feature in a school textbook in India. Her life is described in a chapter of Roving Families, Shifting Homes, an environmental-studies book that includes pictures of her family and the moment she was crowned Miss World in 2000.

She was seen as the bridge between America and India. ABC subsequently asked her to do a show. "I had a holding deal with ABC, to find me a show, and I was very clear about the kind of show I wanted to do, because Indian people have always been put in a box. So I wanted to sort of break that box. ABC was sure they would find the right fit for me, and I think Quantico is. It's me as an actor. [Alex] wasn't written for someone with my ethnicity, but I am Indian in the show, so I've been rooted with my culture in the show, but that's not what the show is about."

Indeed, the character she most likens her part to is Jason Bourne, but she’s swiftly finding her own identity.

• Quantico begins at 10pm on Monday on OSN First HD

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