Priyanka Chopra Jonas Says Daughter Malti Marie Loved 1st Trip to India (Exclusive)

Priyanka Chopra chatted with “Extra’s” Terri Seymour about her new spy thriller series “Citadel.”

Priyanka also gushed about daughter Malti Marie’s first trip to India, which was part of her press tour for the series.

Chopra kicked off the press tour in Mumbai. She shared, “It was so sweet. It was very emotional for me, you know, that that we kicked off this whole global tour in Mumbai. I was sitting right next to Richard [Madden] and my mom and was surrounded by friends and family and industry folk that have seen me since I was 18 years old… It was poignant and really emotional for me. And ‘Citadel’ is a sum of my 22 years in the business. It’s everything that I have learned and everything that I know… It’s something I’m very proud of and hopefully people will enjoy the show as much as we enjoy it.”

Priyanka revealed that Malti “loves” Mumbai, saying, “She loved everything about it. From the sights to the sounds, to the food to, you know, going to her nanny’s house, which is my mom’s house.”

Chopra is now in London, where she got to see husband Nick Jonas and his band The Jonas Brothers perform at the Royal Albert Hall. She commented, “It wasn’t as happenstance as that… I’m filming a movie this summer called ‘Heads of State’ with Idris Elba and John Cena, and we were also supposed to do this world tour for ‘Citadel,’ which included London as our big global premiere. And, you know, the brothers are obviously releasing their new album, called ‘The Album,’ in May as well, so they’re also doing a tour… I think we all collectively tried to figure out in our team, how we can spend most time together and plan our tours together… Our teams were able to pull it off, which is great and Royal Albert Hall rocked. It was such an amazing venue anyway, but that was such a special show.”

As for “Citadel,” she explained the premise, saying, “Citadel is a global spy agency that has no loyalty to any nation. It has loyalty to humanity. So it stops wars, it stops, like, terrorism, shootings, all undercover and in secrecy. So no one knows of its existence. But you have Citadel spies all over the world, which helps us create our show, which is the one that you watched, and then there is an Indian show and an Italian show as well, and all of their stories are connected. So it’s truly a global franchise which is completely original, not based on anything. And it’s pretty massive.”

In the movie, she plays a female spy named Nadia. Of her action-packed role, she noted, “Our characters are not superheroes, they’re real people, they’re spies, so I really wanted to see that… I wanted the viewer to feel, you know, like I got a slamming when I get a slamming instead of it feeling clean and clinical, which it can feel sometimes and especially with female stunt scenes, you know, it can be a little like heroic where I wanted to really for it to feel down and dirty so you understand the stakes at which Nadia is performing.”

She went on, “It takes a lot of precision and practice to be able to, you know, punch someone at, you know, your full strength and then stop before you take out their nose and for it to sell that stuff… We worked with incredible experts, our stunt crew. The multiple stunt crews that we worked with had worked on the most amazing movies in the world, and so I really relied on them.”

Due to the intense stunts, Chopra’s body was “battered, bruised, in pain for at least a year and a half.”

Despite the pain, it was all worth it for Priyanka. She said, “David Weil says the spy space has been monopolized by men for the longest time. And they wanted this show to have a female, you know, doing the physicality of the series and because of her skill set and wanted it to be a spy duo that were toe to toe with each other. So that was just also very new anyway in the genre that doesn’t really exist very much. There are very few women that have enjoyed that that kind of agency in, you know, their casting. So that was really amazing for me.”

While she didn’t create the character, she got her “version of a female Bond.”