Since police drama DI Ray's release onto our screens earlier this week, viewers have been unable to wrap their heads around the fact that it has been two whole decades since Parminder Nagra, who plays the determined DI Rachita Ray, quite literally changed the world with her lead role in Bend It Like Beckham. The empowering film followed Jess Bhamra as she stood up to her conservative parents to follow her heart and play football - something which they did not approve of.
Despite the film having a low budget, it is now viewed as something of a classic, and raked in a whopping £60million at the box office, The Mirror reports. It remains the highest grossing sports film to focus on association football, 20 years later.
Nagra, who was 26 years old when she starred in the iconic film alongside Kiera Knightley, was not too fussed on football before she landed the lead role. After successfully auditioning, Nagra was put through an intensive 10-week coaching course which saw her learning how to curve a football through the air to replicate David Beckham's enviable free kick ability.
With the release of Bend It Like Beckham came an incredible wave of fearless female footballers. Shortly after the film hit cinemas, Nagra said: "It stuns me how the film is doing and how people respond to it.
"In London, there was an article about all these girls bending it like Beckham, and in India there's this big wave of girls playing football. Wow! I can't believe a movie's done this!"
Despite feeling indifferent towards the sport before landing the lead role in Bend It Like Beckham, Nagra became a celebrated figure in the world of football. She became the first woman to win the FIFA Presidential Award and met the former England captain.
Speaking of her career and meeting David and his wife, Victoria, Nagra said: "He loved the film and she said: ‘You were all so funny in it.’ So I went from that to being asked a year later — by George Clooney — if I wanted to play a doctor in ER.
"It was a no-brainer. A little Asian girl from Leicester should never have ended up in Hollywood.
"I lived in the Hollywood Hills and went to work every day at Warner Bros Studios and would see massive A-list stars. And my mum could say I made it as a doctor!"
Despite rocketing to fame and upping sticks to Los Angeles, Nagra claimed that Hollywood certainly had not changed her. Upon landing in America, Nagra made sure that buying chapati flour and lentils was the first thing she did.
After ER ended in 2009, Nagra then landed a role in Fox sci-fi series Alcatraz, before playing a CIA agent in the first season of NBC crime drama series The Blacklist. Nagra also appeared in Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.LD and the Sky Atlantic thriller Fortitude. Gen Z audiences may recognise her from her role as the school counsellor in Netflix's 13 Reasons Why.
In 2018, Nagra was cast in Bird Box alongside Sandra Bullock. Playing the role of a doctor, Nagra was asked to speak with an Indian accent - something she was not too happy with.
She said: "I wasn’t thrilled about playing the doctor again. But it’s an amazing piece of work with an amazing director, and it’s Sandra Bullock.
"I’d rather not have done the accent. It’s hard. There are times when doctor roles come up, and you want to say no, but you want to work."
Nagra also mentioned in an interview with The Mirror recently that she had been turned away from a role in the past as there was already an Indian person in the cast. The DI Ray star said: "I went, ‘Yeah, but I’m completely different to that person. Is that ever gonna happen when you say that, ‘No, we’ve already got a white person on the show’?"
This is certainly not the only time that Nagra has been treated differently for not being white. She also touched on the fact that, back when Bend It Like Beckham was being promoted, bosses did not allow her to be on the front cover of a magazine alongside Keira Knightley due to the colour of her skin.
She reflected: "I've been in rooms where people have gone, 'Oh that's not going to sell because there's just too many brown people in it', and you go, 'Oh. OK'."
"Do you keep pounding? There's moments where you get tired and then there's people that do keep doing that and then they break another glass ceiling.
"You've got Riz Ahmed and Priyanka Chopra - they've got deals with networks and stuff like that, and so things have moved on. But, yeah, that was a story for the books and there was lots of little stories like that."
Nagra's performance in her latest role as Rachita Ray in DI Ray has been praised by many. The four-part series follows Rachita as she takes on a case that forces her to confront a lifelong personal conflict between her identity and her South Asian heritage.
After finally getting her promotion, Rachita’s heart sinks when she suspects she is a 'token appointment', chosen for her ethnicity rather than her ability, then realises she has been burying a personal identity crisis her whole life. Describing her character, Nagra says: "Rachita is a really good, meaty character and to me it’s all about finding this woman's place in the world.
"You don’t often have an Asian female lead on TV – it's starting to happen more, but having been in the business for so long, I feel like I've been saying the same thing for a long time. I can see the change with the likes of Bridgerton, but in DI Ray this is my generation of women, we’re in Birmingham and it’s so relatable – it's nice to play.
"That was the main appeal for me that I’m not playing the best friend of somebody or a secondary character, it’s all about Rachita. One day I’d love to play a character who isn't thinking about her identity – Bend It Like Beckham was about her identity too.
"But those parts are really hard to come by or don't get made very often. DI Ray is just so well-written, Rachita’s interactions with people are really great and I loved playing a strong 40-something woman on the show, helmed by these people and telling this story."
DI Ray will be on ITV tonight, May 4, at 9pm.
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