Priyanka Chopra was asked to go under the knife if she wants to ‘make it big’ in showbiz

Priyanka Chopra has been basking in fame and glory over her successful acting career since decades.

However, the road to the top was no bed of roses for the Quantico actor, 38, who looked back at some of the challenges she faced in the past.

Recounting an incident from 2000 when she was 18 years old, Chopra revealed how following her Miss World win she went on to towards acting.

She further narrated how the first person she met as she stepped into the showbiz, asked her to go under the knife and “fix her proportions.”

Speaking to Metro, she revealed: "It’s so normalized that it doesn’t come up in conversation.”

"I talked about a movie that I walked out of because of how I was spoken to by the director. It was early in my career, but I never told him why I walked out,” she said.

"I never had the courage to stand up for myself, and actually admit it. Because I heard so often, ‘Don’t be a nuisance, you’re new in the industry, you don’t want to have a reputation that you cause trouble or you’re not easy to work with.’ Now on the other side... I know that’s a normalized thing that girls hear so often,” she added.

"I fell for it too, even though I considered myself a forward-thinking, smart girl. I learned from that over time, but at that time, I was terrified. Yes, I faced that then, I faced that like everybody else when you’re in patriarchal industries, which ours has been for a very long time,” she said.

Chopra shared that a director had asked her to “stand up and twirl” for him.

"He stared at me long and hard, assessing me,” she shared, adding that the director then told her to get plastic surgery to “fix” parts of her body.

"If I wanted to be an actress, he said, I’d need to have my proportions ‘fixed,’ and he knew a great doctor in LA he could send me to. My then-manager voiced his agreement with the assessment,” she said.

"I left the director/producer’s office feeling stunned and small. Was he right that I couldn’t be successful unless I had so many body parts ‘fixed’? I thought of how individuals in the media and others in the industry had referred to me as ‘dusky’ and ‘different-looking’ and I wondered if I was cut out for this business after all,” she added.