After Citadel, Priyanka Chopra got equal pay for Love Again as well: ‘I feel I have broken glass ceiling for others too’

Earlier this year, Priyanka Chopra revealed that after two decades in show business, she was finally getting equal pay on her projects beginning with Prime Video’s web series Citadel. The actor revealed that at first she was surprised and later was moved that she would be receiving equal pay with her male co-star Richard Madden on Citadel. She added that initially she didn’t think that it was something it would ever happen in her lifetime so she had stopped thinking about it. (Also read: Priyanka Chopra says she froze her eggs during Quantico shoot, took injections for over a month: ‘It’s expensive’)

Priyanka made her acting debut with Tamil film Thamizhan (2002) opposite Vijay. She made her Bollywood debut a year later with The Hero: Love Story of a Spy (2003). She moved to the US after she was cast as the lead in the American series Quantico in 2015. She followed it up with the feature film Baywatch (2017) with Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron.

In an interview with Shondaland, Priyanka said, “I was kind of very surprised honestly, because I had given up thinking about it or talking about it. Because the disparity between what my male co-actors would get and what I would get, even if I was a co-lead, was just so different and so vast that [it] was not something that I even thought would happen in my lifetime. And that’s a really tragic thing to think about. But when my agents at UTA suggested that they wanted to go back in and negotiate on my behalf and see if that was a possibility. And when it happened, I wondered if it was the fact that the head of Amazon Studios [Jennifer Salke] at that time was a woman.”

She added, “When women are in positions of power, do they turn around and help other women and create other opportunities for other women? I think the answer was yes. So, I felt very moved. I felt very… like I’ve broken the glass ceiling or pushed the glass ceiling a little bit for myself, and hopefully for other actors. I have to say that I have enjoyed parity since in most of the jobs that I have done after Citadel, including Love Again.”

The season finale of Prime Video’s Citadel will be streamed on May 26, 2023. Priyanka also has the rom-com Love Again opposite Sam Heughan lined up for release in May. She begins shooting for her next film Heads Of State with John Cena and Idris Elba later this year.