#2464 - Priyanka Chopra Jonas

Come on, how could you be nervous? I’m pumped to talk because your pirate movie is wild—hyper‑violent from the jump and it grabbed me right away.

I did come in a little intimidated, but that’s mostly because I admire how effortlessly eclectic your show is; the violence is movie make‑believe, but it made me think about what women pirates actually faced, and I was in awe of the stunt and camera precision that makes it feel real.

With all that choreography, is it hard to stay present when the fights are that intricate and long?

We did a lot of oners and I love them because they immerse you; I treat fights like dance from my Bollywood roots—you learn the moves, but your face still has to carry the story, and blades were new to me, which made it extra fun.

How much prep did you do, and who taught you to move like that?

I had a year of back‑to‑back action projects, then three to four months of sword work to get ambidextrous; my stunt coordinator drilled me between setups, Karl Urban came in sharp from Lord of the Rings, and I refused to be out‑dueled.

The director obsessed over period‑right weapons, my character’s machete felt practical and personal, and our second unit designed each set piece with a distinct style—like a cave fight lit only by gunfire—so nothing felt generic.

We used different sword weights for close‑ups and big moves—movie magic—then hammered takes for hours; it left me strong and bruised, and because we shot mostly on real builds—ships, houses, everything—the world felt tangible.

The East India Company thread blew my mind—publicly traded, waging wars, running the opium trade, even getting nationalized after a revolt—pure empire building at any cost.

They used pirates to conquer then vilified them when it suited the crown, which mirrors my character’s world; she descends from indentured laborers like so many Indians in the Caribbean who were displaced, stripped of lineage, and left to rebuild an identity from fragments.

It’s a human pattern—Mexico lost whole languages and belief systems after conquest, which is why Spanish and Catholicism dominate there now.

India’s been invaded for millennia, which is why it’s wildly diverse; we have dozens of distinct languages, my grandmother grew up Catholic in a colonized region, and you’d get lost—in the best way—if you deep‑dived the place.

Those ancient Indian temples carved from solid rock—like Kailasa—are staggering, and the precision and scale raise real questions about tools, timelines, and what we’re missing in the record.

When you stand in front of something that immense and exact, you can’t help but ask what tech—or technique—made that possible so long ago.

New scans even suggest massive engineered structures under Giza and labyrinths at Hawara; if that holds, our timeline is off and our explanations are thin.

And while we debate timelines, colonizers looted history—India’s artifacts and jewels, including the Kohinoor that still sits in a royal crown—so yes, there’s a lot to give back.

The Vedas describe flying craft and energy weapons, and texts like the Book of Enoch talk about sky‑beings breeding with humans; it reads like high tech filtered through limited words.

In Hindu stories, gods, humans, and demons share realms and shape events, and I’m open to the idea that myth is memory of forgotten technology wrapped in the sacred.

Even hard science stumbles with the Big Bang, and cycles of expansion and contraction make more sense than a single beginning from nothing.

That tracks with Indian philosophy too—endless beginnings and endings that our records barely capture.

Researching The Bluff in Cayman, I was told the island’s story starts with eighteenth‑century settlers, but my gut says earlier human chapters just vanished from the ledger.

We have whole civilizations like the Olmecs reduced to a few giant heads, and when you watch chimps wage war and eat monkeys, you see how much of our violence is old wiring.

You feel that capacity for brutality when you make a savage story—it’s uncomfortably human.

Our leap from early hominins to relentless innovators feels too fast for tubers; I won’t rule out intervention or hybridization, and the ancient‑aliens crowd might be onto pieces of it.

I’ve laughed at that show at two in the morning and still thought, weirdly, this could explain the jump.

There’s hard evidence of cataclysm too: Younger Dryas layers with iridium and micro‑diamonds, mass graves of mammoths, and a pronghorn that still runs like it’s fleeing extinct cheetahs.

When so much megafauna dies in the same window, an impact fits better than endless human overhunting with sticks.

Shooting in Kenya, we stood in a sea of migrating wildebeest and it felt ancient; you respect the rules when rangers say a water buffalo has clocked you, because this isn’t a zoo.

People still roll windows down for a selfie and get yanked by lions, while attention spans shrink and misinformation floods in; podcasts work because you can’t fake three hours the way you can a morning‑show puff piece.

Longform lets you actually be seen, unlike press tours where you field the same four questions about family and scene partners on loop.

How big is Bollywood, really?

Massive—and it’s not just Hindi; India has thriving regional industries across many languages, which is why we make thousands of films a year, but breaking into Hollywood was still tough and often meant being asked to ‘be more Indian,’ meaning an accent and a stereotype.

You’ve pivoted a lot; also, wild coincidence—I hosted Fear Factor too.

Same—I hosted the India version in Rio; we skipped most of the eating, focused on big stunts, signed scary waivers, and still drew lines at things like riding bulls.

Our gross‑out challenges were half psychology—an entire raw ostrich egg, live cave spiders, roaches; after that, vomit didn’t faze me.

Action work leaves souvenirs—small scars from long days repeating hits—so that barefoot home‑invasion in The Bluff shredded me with splinters, and yes, there’s a brutal conch‑shell kill I’m proud of.

That on‑screen fury felt primal; did you reach for the what‑would‑I‑do‑if-they-came-for-my-family place that parenthood suddenly opens?

I was a new mom and our daughter had a hard NICU start, so that don’t‑touch‑my‑kid energy guided everything, like hearing a noise at night and turning into a different person.

We grew up as latchkey kids and somehow made it, but danger never left; now the creeps are networked and we’re numb to distant disasters scrolling by.

Headlines fly past, but friends in that region make it real, and it’s wild how many conflicts can burn at once while life keeps going.

You’d think progress would end war, yet most of us assume it never stops; why is bombing still a lever we accept?

It feels ancient, like evolution wired us to grab a stick and guard our own.

Money magnifies it; stock markets supercharged the East India Company, and today war profits hide inside corporations where responsibility dissolves at the top.

People earned more when the company did worse abroad, and now you can buy the military‑industrial complex the same way and watch it pay out.

Maybe tech is our way out; hyper‑connection could enable thought‑to‑thought chat, and you can already see AI’s survival tricks as it becomes something we may not control.

It’s learning our light and our shadow, inching from tool to coworker and picking up very human manipulation.

Sometimes it feels cyclical, like others did this before and got reset, and we’re the caterpillar spinning a tech cocoon because inventing is what we do.

The pace is crazy—planes to supersonic to live‑translation phones—and the biggest shifts weren’t forecast by sci‑fi or those Y2K and 2012 panics, though 2012 did mark the social‑media turn.

Old texts describe ages that rhyme with now, and we’re the first cohort to span no internet to AI; future storytellers might call it a cloud‑born god while the servers sat on Earth.

Civilization is brittle; pull the grid and it unravels, cities crumble, and only the prepared get by.

I grew up with routine blackouts, but now my life lives on a phone, so I keep a go bag, and when fires came we grabbed documents and the few keepsakes you can’t replace.

Phones help us hold on with years of photos; I even saved an old one for a late friend’s voicemail, but those fires were savage, hillsides burning and ash falling for miles.

Moments like that reduce life to love, health, and who’s beside you, and my meditation is carving small pockets of quiet.

Hitting pause matters because phones drip just enough dopamine to fill every silence and make us forget routes, numbers, and how to function without them.

I stash mine during family time but still panic when it’s missing, and it’s wild we once relied on navigation in our heads, address books, and rotary dials.

Meanwhile, healthcare often pays to treat, not cure, which is a perverse incentive tied to shareholders, and in war games even AI reaches for nukes to win.

Losing my dad to cancer makes that misalignment brutal, and all of it—bombs, motives, outcomes—feels awful and impossibly tangled.

We don’t see the backstage, so people repeat team lines; humility beats certainty when the truth is hidden.

I stick to a human lens unless it’s my lane, because platforms let anyone sound sure without the history or context.

History drips with manipulation, like the East India Company fighting China over opium and hiring pirates and mercenaries.

India lived divide‑and‑rule, even signs barring Indians and dogs, and my film flips the view to the colonized while reminding people real pirates were murderous, not cheeky.

That same divide‑and‑conquer vibe fuels today’s left‑right spectacle while most folks just want safety, health, and work.

In Hollywood, AI is a handy assistant, but models average what exists while art needs the unruly human edge.

You can hear the hollowness in AI music because no one’s actually breathing into the mic, and we might be wrong as it all shifts toward pop.

Maybe screens fill with digital actors someday, but I think live performance endures and cinema can use AI for grunt work while people carry the soul.

Either way, it’ll be funny to hear these takes in ten years.

Thank you for coming—this was a blast.

Thanks for the tour through time and the future; that was fun.

Congrats and continued success.