Priyanka Chopra gets candid about failed pop career with will.i.am and Pitbull: 'I wasn't made for it'

Priyanka Chopra candidly discussed her abortive pop career and the 'fearless unwavering confidence' that prompted her to try to be a singer.

After being crowned Miss World 2000, she became a movie star in Bollywood musicals, where playback singers perform the songs for the lip-syncing actors.

In the early 2010s she attempted a foray into music that peaked with the songs In My City featuring will.i.am in 2012 and Exotic featuring Pitbull in 2013.

Although In My City was a hit in her native India, Exotic failed to catch fire and her fusion pop songs in general proved to be a damp squib with the global audience.

'Sure, I can’t hit the note because Pitbull or Dr. Dre is sitting right there,' said the 43-year-old, poking fun at herself, in a cover interview for Marie Claire. 

'I quickly realized that I wasn’t made for it and should go back to my day job of acting,' added Chopra, who has since expanded her screen career to Hollywood.

After striking out to America to widen the scope of her stardom, she tied the knot in 2018 with Nick Jonas, who shot to fame in the boy band the Jonas Brothers.

However she has never allowed her pop act husband to listen to the 40 unreleased tracks she still has in her archive from her own failed stab at his profession.

'They’re in a vault somewhere until I find the confidence to bring them out again,' said Chopra, the daughter of two military doctors. 

Looking back on the decision to try to launch a singing career, she marveled: 'That fearless unwavering confidence in myself - I don’t know where it used to come from.'

Her pop career fizzled in spite of the fact her personal Artists and Repertoire (A&R) representative was the iconic Interscope co-founder Jimmy Iovine. 

Her priorities have shifted, thanks in large part to her becoming a mother with the arrival of her and her husband's daughter Malti via surrogate in January 2022.

'I used to want to juggle all the balls and do all the things, but now I listen to my gut a lot more,' the Bajirao Mastani star explained. 'I’m more instinctive, and I’ve found power in being able to say "no," which used to be hard for me.'

Any role she selects 'has to touch my heart' in order to justify the time away from her family. 'Did it move me? Most of the work that I try to align myself with does.'

One of her upcoming movies is Varanasi, the first feature-length picture she has done in her native country since the 2021 release The White Tiger.

Varanasi is a product not of Bollywood - the Bombay-based Hindi-language film industry that made Chopra a household name in India - but of the Telugu-language film industry based in the southern city of Hyderabad.

Due for release in 2027, the picture is the latest project by S.S. Rajamouli, the director of such box office juggernauts as RRR and Baahubali, which broke out of the regional Telugu-speaking audience to become 'pan-India' hits.

Chopra said Varanasi - shot both in Kenya and India - is 'going to be a spectacle like never before,' adding: 'We travel across the world, and we travel across time, which is what makes this movie really interesting.'

At another point in her new interview, she reflected: '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."  But at least in this season of my life, I’m giving myself permission to not run as much.'

She noted: 'Maybe it’s because I’m in a position where I’m able to make choices and seek the work that I want. 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.'