Priyanka Chopra Jonas admits she’d rather not do stunt work if given the choice.
“I didn’t want to do my stunts,” she says of her new action-packed spy series, “Citadel.”
But the acting veteran is a victim of her own success. “I trust myself to do it,” Chopra Jonas tells me. “The mandate from the filmmakers was, ‘We would love for the actors’ faces to be seen as much as you can and where you feel safe. I’m someone who has tremendous experience with action movies and action parts. Not just with my TV show, but my Bollywood action movies. I was working 15, 20 years ago when I didn’t even have stunt doubles. I had a little man wearing a wig with shaved arms that used to do stunts for me that were too dangerous, because we didn’t even have women at that time. So I learned how to do my stuff.”
I caught up with Chopra Jonas at a “Citadel” fan screening in Culver City Tuesday night. She also revealed she was left with a scar after shooting the Amazon Prime Video series when her left eyebrow had an unfortunate run-in with a camera.
“It was at the end of a rainy London day, and we were losing light so it was, ‘Let’s rush, rush, rush,’” Chopra Jonas recalls. “The ground was wet, and I went an inch in front of where I was supposed to stop. So the camera came an inch closer to me and the matte box took out my eyebrow. But you know, I have a cool scar and a good story to tell. I just put some surgical glue on her and closed her up and finished the day.”
“I didn’t want to come back and have to do that whole thing again,” she continues. “I was just like, ‘Let’s just get it done.’ I had fake blood and mud and stuff on my face anyway so you couldn’t event tell.”
Co-star Richard Madden says he’s still feeling some pain from his stunt work. “I’ve got a lot of dull aches,” he tells me. “I’m not as young as I used to be. There’s a lot of stretching that goes on now.”
But it was worth it. “I wanted to do all of the stunts because we’re trying to make the action and the drama intertwined,” Madden says. “I can’t just be like, ‘I’m gonna sit in my trailer and let the stunt man do it.’ They want my face in there because Priyanka and I needed to connect together, and we get to tell a bit of the story in the middle of an action sequence. We don’t want to miss out on that.”
“Citadel” premieres on Amazon Prime Video April 28.
