Priyanka Chopra on the Botched Facial Surgery That Put Her Into a “Deep, Deep Depression”

Priyanka Chopra is opening about about a dark time in her life, brought on my a botched procedure when she was first starting out as an actress. The Citadel star went on The Howard Stern Show to promote her new Prime Video show, and ended up discussing the failed nose job that sent her into “a deep, deep depression.”

Chopra explained that her doctor recommended she have the procedure done in the early 2000s in order to remove a polyp in her nasal cavity. While it should have been a fairly simple surgery, the surgeon made a mistake during the procedure, causing Chopra’s face to look “completely different” after the fact. At the time, the actress was fairly fresh off her Miss World 2000 win, and she’d recently started working in Bollywood. The results of the botched surgery caused her to lose jobs on three different movies and sent her into a depression, as she thought her acting career “was over before it started.”

The actress went on, saying she didn’t want to leave the house after the procedure, but eventually her father, who happens to be a doctor, convinced her to get corrective surgery. “I was terrified of that, but he was like, ‘I will be in the room with you,’” she said. “He held my hands through it and helped me build back my confidence.”

This isn’t the first time Chopra has spoken about the botched surgery. In her 2021 memoir, Unfinished, she wrote about feeling “devastated and hopeless” following the incident. The actress went into more detail in the book, explaining, “While shaving off the polyp, the doctor also accidentally shaved the bridge of my nose and the bridge collapsed. When it was time to remove the bandages and the condition of my nose was revealed, Mom and I were horrified. My original nose was gone. My face looked completely different. I wasn't me anymore.” The situation was worsened by the media coverage of her surgery, with tabloids called her “Plastic Chopra.”

In the years since, various corrective surgeries and time has helped Chopra move on. “While it took a few years of seeing a stranger gazing back at me every time I looked in the mirror, I've gotten accustomed to this face,” she said. “Now when I look in the mirror, I am no longer surprised; I've made peace with this slightly different me.”