Priyanka Chopra Jonas opened up last week on Howard Stern’s radio show about a surgical procedure she regrets: an early-2000s cosmetic removal of a polyp in her nasal cavity that left her depressed and worrying that her career would be over.
Jonas won the Miss India pageant, and then the Miss World pageant in 2000, shortly after a passport agent had encouraged her to take modelling shots at age 16. When she had the surgery, the shape of her nose was altered and her face looked “completely different,” she told the radio host.
“This thing happens, and my face looks completely different, and I went into a deep, deep depression,” she said.
She said that she was fired from three different movies as a result of the change in her appearance.
It was only after her father, a doctor himself, encouraged her to seek corrective surgery, that she was able to muster up the courage to face her fears and get another procedure to restore her face.
“I was terrified of that, but he was like, ‘I will be in the room with you,’” she said. “He held my hands through it and helped me build back my confidence.”
It was also her father, she said, who literally installed bars on her bedroom window in India, and hired a driver to take her to and from school because he was worried that her looks and fashion sense, after spending time in the United States, posed a threat to her safety.
“My dad was super paranoid because he sent to America a 12-year-old with braids … and I come back, you know, a little bit more woman than my dad would’ve anticipated,” she said. “I had boys follow me home and one of them jumped onto my balcony at night. That’s why my dad was like, ‘Fuck this! You [get] bars, and all your jeans are confiscated, you’re gonna wear Indian suits.’”
Now, of course, she’s married to singer Nick Jonas, and they have one child together. Chopra Jonas also stars in Amazon Prime Video's Citadel.
This article first appeared on vanityfair.com
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