Peak Priyanka

If you ever find yourself being ushered into a well-appointed private lounge, in an opulent high-rise in midtown Manhattan, to meet with Priyanka Chopra Jonas, perhaps the first thing you will notice about her is her voice. It’s soothing and cashmere soft. "My husband calls it the 'ASMR voice,'" she laughs. (Her husband, of course, is singer Nick Jonas, who also happens to have his own set of noteworthy pipes.) When I joke with Chopra Jonas that she must record a message for me to wind down to in the evenings, without missing a beat, she purrs, "Good night, Lola. Stop scrolling. It’s time to go to bed."

It’s unclear to me if sleep is something Chopra Jonas, 43, gets a lot of herself. Over the course of her career, she’s been a pageant queen, a Hindi film icon, a fledgling pop singer, a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, the global face of legacy brands like Bvlgari, Johnnie Walker, and Max Factor, and yes, she’s even narrated bedtime stories for the Calm app. In 2016, Time magazine named her as one of "The 100 Most Influential People" in the world. Five years later, her memoir, Unfinished, was a New York Times bestseller.

In recent years, Chopra Jonas has focused on her production company, Purple Pebble Pictures. Among its slate of projects: Anuja, a 22-minute Hindi film that Chopra Jonas executive produced, which earned an Oscar nomination for best Live Action Short Film in 2025; and To Kill A Tiger, which also got an Oscar nod for best Documentary Feature Film.

"Making movies is not easy, getting them sold and getting eyeballs on them is even harder," Chopra Jonas says. Doing it without the benefit of celebrity parentage or connections (which Chopra Jonas did not have) renders it even more difficult. Which is why she created her company, in part, to help provide an "in" for non-nepo babies with fresh perspectives and to be the "shoulders for new filmmakers to stand on to be able to showcase their talent and their work," she says. As a result, she adds, "I’ve been very lucky to work with some amazing people on their journeys."

And, of course, she hasn’t stopped acting. For the past few years, she’s traversed the globe for big- and small-screen roles, including time spent in London shooting the second season of the hit espionage caper Citadel alongside her co-star Richard Madden.

When we meet, right before the holidays in December, she’s coming off of a nearly-three-month stay in Australia for her latest project, the high-seas revenge thriller The Bluff. In the film, Chopra Jonas enters her swashbuckling era, playing Ercell "Bloody Mary" Bodden, a retired pirate who is forced to confront her murky past when members of the crew she deserted track her down and threaten to destroy the peace she’s found in the Cayman Islands.

The film, which began streaming on Prime at the end of February, couldn’t be further from Robinson Crusoe or the family-friendly Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, nor is Chopra Jonas playing the role of a lovable drunk swanning about like Captain Jack Sparrow. Instead, the picture, like her character’s name suggests, is brutal, blood-drenched, and, at times, downright gory. "It’s not for the faint-hearted. My mom watched it with half her face covered because [it was too] scary," Chopra Jonas says with a smile.

For her part, Chopra Jonas found it liberating to play a matriarch who is unafraid to do whatever it takes to save her loved ones. "There was something really freeing, bold, and honest about it," she says. "I would go to the ends of hell to protect my family, and we don’t get to see that with women characters very much." It’s a given that male actors are afforded the opportunity to be "violent and unapologetic" on screen, she says, but to her delight, her Mary dishes out all manner of grisly deaths, macheteing groins, blasting open craniums with double-barrel pistols, and in one scene, bashing an enemy’s face to a pulp with a conch shell.

In preparation for her role, Chopra Jonas went through stunt training and researched female pirates, discovering legendary historical figures like Mary Read, Anne Bonny, and Grace O'Malley, a fierce married mother of multiple children who commanded her own fleet of hundreds of men in the 16th century and was hailed as Ireland’s "Pirate Queen."

It’s that level of commitment that makes Chopra Jonas a unique talent, says her manager Anjula Acharia. "Her leadership is subtle but powerful," Acharia writes in an email. "It shows up in how prepared she is, how collaborative she is, and the standards she sets. On The Bluff, she was very intentional—not just about her performance, but about the story being told and the environment it was told in. For her, representation isn’t just about visibility; it’s about having real agency and depth, and that absolutely influenced the work."

The film reunited Chopra Jonas with the Russo Brothers, Joe and Anthony, the producing duo behind Citadel and the Captain America and Avengers films. Their sister, Angela Russo-Otstot, also joined the family affair as a producer and found Chopra Jonas’s influence on the set unmatchable. "Pri has a body of work that is mathematically confounding—some 70 films in her life thus far," Russo-Otstot shares. "When she shows up on a set, her depth of experience and work ethic are unmatched, but she is never showy about it. Instead, she is humble and admirably diligent. She has conviction and intentionality in every decision she makes, but also keeps space for healthy collaboration with everyone else around her...All that said, she doesn’t take any shit. She looks out for others—especially other women."

It’s a care and commitment that shows up not just professionally, but personally. Over the course of our conversations, it’s clear that deep friendships and strong family bonds are of the utmost importance to Chopra Jonas. "I like to keep a tight circle of people that I trust, because I give completely and wholeheartedly," she says. "The only way I know how to love is 100 percent. So either I’m all in or I have a wall. I don’t know how to do the in between."

Look closely at her forearms and faint autobiographical tattoos come into focus: paw prints for her three dogs, a portrait of her daughter’s face in profile, and, most notably, the phrase "Daddy’s lil girl," depicted in her late father’s handwriting, and etched on her wrist shortly before he died after a nearly-eight-year battle with cancer in 2013. "I was very close to him," she says of her father, a physician in the Indian Army. "We had this amazing bond, which was unsaid. It didn’t need a lot of words. His loss was tough on me. He was just 63—so young."

It was her mother who walked her down the aisle when she wed Jonas in a three-day extravaganza in Jodhpur, India. The couple had both a traditional Hindu ceremony and a Christian one. Skeptics who questioned the couple’s 10-year age gap and the relative speed of their whirlwind cross-cultural union—they began officially dating in May 2018, were engaged two months later, and married that December—have been all but silenced. In the slew of Instagram photos she shares with her 94 million followers, Mr. and Mrs. Jonas appear genuinely besotted, cuddling tenderly in quiet moments at home, smoldering at big-ticket galas, admiring their mutual genetic blessings on vacation in far-flung locales. A candid moment of Jonas lounging in a pool prompts a lascivious caption from Chopra Jonas: "When he’s just, out there...looking like a snack."

They’ve been married for seven years now, which for Chopra Jonas has gone by in a blink. "It feels like I don’t remember life before my husband, and it feels like he’s been in my life forever. It’s great. I’m lucky—really lucky," she says, previously sharing, "We love our little life and our little family and wherever we go, we fly home immediately. I’m on my way to the airport literally taking off my wig, my makeup, changing in the car, just because I want to run back home."

She describes Jonas as "so well brought up and just a good man who takes the time to understand behavior. He has an intelligence and wisdom about him, and I needed some of that wisdom in my life. We have found a balance with each other where we can truly be the best versions of ourselves because the other person’s supporting you."

Although their love story has been an enchanted one, the couple’s parenthood journey was anything but. In 2022, their four-year-old daughter, Malti Marie, was born via surrogate a full trimester early and spent 110 days in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit "fighting for her life," says Chopra Jonas, eyes welling at the thought. "Our daughter was very coveted and very desired because I had a really tough time with pregnancies," she says. "She’s my miracle baby, so everything just stopped when she was born. I think it’s a preemie mom or a NICU mom thing, but I’m still in constant fear. When she’s not right by my side or she’s at school or when I’m in a different country, it’s this feeling that your heart is running outside of your body."

Her support system helps, including a school-based mom group that seems to be the antithesis of the toxic ones that have dominated headlines in recent months. "A lot of them are working moms as well, but they don’t travel as much as I do," Chopra Jonas says. "They have been so helpful in sending me reminders. 'I know you’re in Korea but remember that tomorrow is snack day for your family.'"

Much like her parents, Malti Marie is a performer. "She’s in the middle of a room just telling her jokes and singing at the top of her voice," Chopra Jonas says, smiling. "It’s such a wonder to me that she’s this human being who has so much of me, my husband, her grandparents, her ascendants, and every day she’s a surprise. She’s the greatest gift of my life. All my priorities have changed. Everything starts and ends with her."

A few weeks after our initial conversation in New York, I check in with Chopra Jonas over Zoom from my home in Lagos, Nigeria. "You have to have some suya and jollof rice [for me]," she says. Later that evening, she’ll travel to Hyderabad to film additional scenes for Varanasi, marking her return to Indian pictures after a years-long break. Rooted in Hindu mythology and spanning millennia, the project, shot in India and Africa, is "going to be a spectacle like never before," she promises. "We travel across the world, and we travel across time, which is what makes this movie really interesting."

Back in the real world, the new year is off to a rocky start, however. Greenland is at the center of a diplomatic crisis. World leaders are hurling veiled threats on international stages and ICE agents have descended upon Minnesota, killing two protesters and injuring several more. I wonder how Chopra Jonas will help her daughter navigate being a woman of color in America? How will she ensure her self-esteem remains strong?

"As a parent, you dread as time passes because it means having tougher conversations [with your kids], which means having tougher conversations with yourself as well," Chopra Jonas says. "Even I’m grappling with where the world is right now and my emotions around how scary it is to be the parent of a young child at a time where the safety of children is so fragile." That said, Chopra Jonas looks to her own circle for inspiration and plans to remind her daughter of the beauty of being born from, "the incredible coming together of two cultures," she says. "She is the epitome of how incredible diversity actually is."

Motherhood has transformed Chopra Jonas in countless ways, she says. For starters, it’s made her infinitely more patient, grateful, and forgiving of herself. "I’m not as mean to myself. I used to berate myself when I failed at something, or didn’t achieve the level of excellence that I wanted," she says. "I’ve taken the pressure off. As women, when we are in ambitious jobs or jobs that require constant movement, we can be really mean to ourselves. To push yourself to be able to work that much harder."

And historically, the film industry has done an abysmal job of making women feel assured about, well, anything. In fact, it feels expressly designed to promote bottomless feelings of self-doubt; a feature, not a bug. "Our job is literally gig to gig as an actor, so there’s an internal anguish, 'I have to keep doing it and I have to be the hamster on the wheel,'" she says. "But at least in this season of my life, I’m giving myself permission to not run as much. Maybe it’s because I’m in a position where I’m able to make choices and seek the work that I want." She pauses, then continues, "I still want to build. I still dream big. I am very ambitious, but I feel like I can now operate with a sense of balance."

As Acharia sees it, "What I’ve seen over the years is a real shift toward intention," she writes. "Earlier on, it was about building and proving range; now it’s about choosing with care. She’s thinking long-term—about impact, about legacy, about shaping stories, not just starring in them. This next chapter feels less about doing more, and more about doing what truly matters to her."

All the talk of intention reminds Chopra Jonas of her short-lived stint as a pop star. After she waltzed away with the grand crown at the 2000 Miss World pageant, she was inundated with film offers. Though she had initially planned to study aeronautical engineering, the bright lights proved too intoxicating to resist. She made her acting debut in the 2002 drama Thamizhan. Work was steady and she soon became a household name. Still, she began to feel pigeonholed and longed to break free from the insular world of Indian cinema.

And so, in her late 20s, Chopra Jonas seized the opportunity to sign with Desi Hits!, which partnered with Interscope Records, despite having no music industry experience. "That fearless unwavering confidence in myself—I don’t know where it used to come from," she says. Interscope’s head and cofounder, legendary producer Jimmy Iovine, was her personal A&R rep. She worked with major players like will.i.am and palled around with the likes of Usher and Bono. Singing about being "hotter than the tropics," on tracks like the South Asian-inspired "Exotic," didn’t quite resonate with listeners, however.

"Sure, I can’t hit the note because Pitbull or Dr. Dre is sitting right there," she says with a self-deprecating chuckle. "I quickly realized that I wasn’t made for it and should go back to my day job of acting." She still has approximately 40 unreleased tracks buried somewhere deep in the recesses of her laptop. Will she ever play them for her chart-topping husband? Not a chance, she says, looking slightly horrified at the thought. "They’re in a vault somewhere until I find the confidence to bring them out again."

In that way, parenthood has focused her. "I used to want to juggle all the balls and do all the things, but now I listen to my gut a lot more. I’m more instinctive, and I’ve found power in being able to say 'no,' which used to be hard for me." To warrant being pulled away from her family, the projects she takes on need to mean something to her. "It has to touch my heart," she says. "Did it move me? Most of the work that I try to align myself with does." Seeking a deeper purpose, and not just accolades, says Chopra Jonas in her soft hum—that sounds perfect for this next chapter.

We Showed Priyanka Chopra Jonas What’s On Her Algorithm… - YouTube

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Photographer Quil Lemons | Stylist SK Tang | Hair Stylist Irinel de León | Makeup Artist Fiona Stiles | Manicurist Kimmie Kyees | DP Sam Miron | Video Producer Kellie Scott

This story appears in Marie Claire's 2026 Craftsmanship Issue.