Did Priyanka Chopra get a nose job? Actor dubbed 'Plastic Chopra' after 'original nose' was shaved by accident
The stunning Priyanka Chopra Jonas' memoir 'Unfinished' released on Tuesday, February 9, where the actress reflects candidly on her two decades in the spotlight, and all the talk of body parts and skin tone collectively that made her feel "devalued and unseen and uncertain" about her future.
One topic she doesn't shy away from addressing is the rumors of plastic surgery — the impact of a nose surgery gone wrong — that changed the way the Indian press and Bollywood treated her. Chopra won Miss World in 2000 and needed to have a polyp surgically removed from her nasal cavity less than a year later. A polypectomy should have been a pretty routine procedure. "Unfortunately, it wasn't," she wrote in her book.
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A surgery gone wrong
The polypectomy removed the benign growth, but ended up shaving the bridge of her nose, according to Entertainment Tonight, causing it to collapse. The 'White Tiger' actor was "horrified." She wrote, "I felt devastated and hopeless. Every time I looked in the mirror, a stranger looked back at me, and I didn’t think my sense of self or my self-esteem would ever recover from the blow." The press, most unkindly, dubbed her "Plastic Chopra".
"I was dared to give an explanation for the obviously different nose, but I chose a course then that I’ve followed in all the years since," Chopra reflected. "I decided that there was a line I was going to draw in my life. I am an entertainer. That’s what I’ve signed on to do, and that’s what I love doing."
"I will say my lines, dance my dance, hit my mark. I’ll do my best to make you laugh, and I’ll do my best to make you cry, but just because I’m a public person doesn’t mean everything about my life has to be public knowledge. I get to choose what I share and when I share it," she said.
The bad surgery cost her her work, says the actress who had already become well-known in India for her looks. The incident, however, resulted in her getting fired from two movies. The actress said she has had "several corrective surgeries" and has now "gotten accustomed to this face".
"… My difference is my strength," she writes. "If I looked like other "classically beautiful" girls, then I wouldn't stand out, and more important, I wouldn't be me." The actress adds that she is no longer surprised when she looks into the mirror.
She has made peace with this slightly different version of herself. "I'm just like everyone else: I look at myself in the mirror and think maybe I can lose a little weight; I think maybe I can work out a little more. But I'm also content. This is my face. This is my body. I might be flawed, but I am me," she added.
Body under scrutiny
It wasn't just Chopra's face that was under fire. Her body was under scrutiny too. The 38-year-old actress revealed in her autobiography that a director once told her to get a "boob job" and "add a little cushioning" to her butt (advice that her manager at the time agreed with).
"After a few minutes of small talk, the director/producer told me to stand up and twirl for him. I did. He stared at me long and hard, assessing me, and then suggested that I get a boob job, fix my jaw, and add a little more cushioning to my butt," she said, adding that the unnamed director said he knew a great doctor in LA he could send her to.
She thought of how individuals in the media and the entertainment industry had referred to her as "dusky" and "different-looking" and was left wondering whether she was cut out for this business after all.
The star's experience was 'normalized' in Hollywood and she was told to keep quiet about the incident if she wanted to enjoy a long career. "I never had the courage to stand up for myself, and actually admit it. Because I heard so often, 'Don't be a nuisance, you're new in the industry, you don't want to have a reputation that you cause trouble or you're not easy to work with'."
"Now on the other side of 35. I know that's a normalized thing that girls hear so often," she wrote. The actor said she fell for it even though she considered herself a "forward-thinking, smart girl", adding that even though she was terrified, she learned from it over time. "Yes I faced that then, I faced that like everybody else when you're in patriarchal industries, which ours has been for a very long time," she wrote.