Mary Kom should have been played by someone from the Northeast: Priyanka Chopra

Priyanka Chopra revealed that she was wrongly cast to play the role of the six-time amateur boxing champion Mangte Chungneijang Mary Kom in an interview with Vanity Fair Magazine on 13 January, 2022.

Chopra who is the cover girl for Vanity Fair’s February issue said that someone who exhibits features from northeast India should have played the role of the famed boxer. She expressed that she was skeptical from the beginning to take up the role. Respecting the highly disciplined life of Mary Kom, Chopra revealed that it was both mentally and physically stressful to wear in the psychology of the 38-year-old boxer.

In the interview, Chopra said “When I played Mary Kom, I was very skeptical taking it on in the beginning because she was a living, breathing icon and she made a place for so many female athletes. Plus, I look nothing like her. She comes from the northeast of India and I am from northern India and we physically didn’t look alike. In hindsight, the part should have probably gone to someone from the northeast,”

The Matrix 4 star, who is recently on news after dropping her “Jonas” surname added during the interview, “But I was just greedy as an actor to get a chance to tell her story because she inspired me so much, as a woman, as an Indian woman, as an athlete. When the filmmakers insisted I do it, I was just like, ‘You know what? I’m going to do it.'”

The former Miss World, Chopra who has hits like ‘Tamizhan’, ‘Aitraaz’  ‘Don’ ‘Kaminey’  ‘Mary Kom’  ‘Quantico’  ‘The White Tiger’ and the recent ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ added, “I went and met Mary, I spent time in her home, I met her children, I met her husband. I had to spend almost five months training to learn the sport, which is not easy, by the way… And to physically alter my body as well, to get into an athlete’s shape. So, physically, it was really tough, mentally, it was really tough. Because I physically didn’t look like her, I decided to embody her spirit. So, I spent a lot of time with her so that she could educate me about what her choices were, why she made the choices that she did.”

PC who started filming for the role in June 2013, told in a press conference on 29 January 2013 “Every part of my body hurts. Now I know how Mary Kom trains herself every day”. Married to American singer, songwriter, Nick Jonas, PC has been cheering for the Manipuri boxer, a mother of 3 sons for all these years. Kom holds the rare feat to be the only female boxer to win a medal in each one of the first 7 World Championships, and the only boxer to win 8 World Championship medals and her biopic “MARY KOM” collected a gross revenue 1.04 billion in 2014.