“It was physical and emotional. The Bluff is a hard-hitting drama as well. It’s an action thriller,” she tells me over a very early Zoom call from Los Angeles. “It felt like a big responsibility,
with a heavy part. Personally, as a mother, it’s about how far a woman would go to protect her family. What would you do to protect your children? And that was what really fed me in this part. There’s physicality, but I’ve done action movies before. This was not just about that.” On Amazon Prime Video since 25 February, The Bluff captured Chopra Jonas’s attention immediately. “When I got the script, I read it in one go. As soon as I was done, I was just like, ‘This is incredible,’” she says. “I want to be inspired every time I go to a set. Now, after being in the industry for 25 years, I’m in a position where I am able to choose what makes me want to go to work every morning.”
Looking back, Chopra Jonas started a stratospheric career in India, gaining major recognition at the age of 18, when she represented her country and won the Miss World pageant in 2000. Instantly, she attracted the attention of different filmmakers and producers. For her cinematic debut in 2002, she bagged a role in Thamizhan, while in 2003 she became a part of The Hero: Love Story of a Spy and Andaaz, two projects that premiered in the same month. After she took the trophy for Best Female Debut for her performance in Andaaz at the Filmfare Awards, things moved at the speed of light. “I was thrown into the ground running,” she remembers, with a laugh. “I’m the kind of person that if I have a challenge, I will choose to survive and thrive. I have always been competitive, even with myself. Either in the pageant world or cinema, I wasn’t related to anyone, so there was no one who was going to help me out in this business. I had to learn really fast.”
Dress, Naeem Khan. Shoes, Aquazzura. Portal dining table and Episode armchair, Apparatus