Indian actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas has addressed persistent speculation about her marriage to singer Nick Jonas, acknowledging that the constant scrutiny over their 10-year age gap in the early years of their relationship was upsetting.
“We’re eight years in,” she told Variety, on online gossip that suggested their marriage was on the brink of collapse. “If people want to keep waiting for it to implode, that’s their choice. I stopped thinking about it.”
The couple married in December 2018 after a whirlwind six-month romance following their meeting in May of that year, and they share a daughter, Malti Marie Chopra Jonas, born in January 2022.
“I don’t know what was it about us that rubbed people the wrong way,” she said. “I think there was the intercultural nature of it – different countries, different religions, age gap. It was very hurtful. And we both, instead of looking out, just sort of looked at each other, and we were like, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ So it’s like water off a duck’s back now.”
The 43-year-old Citadel star reflected on their early days as a couple, admitting that she was surprised by how quickly their relationship progressed.
“We got married really quick, within six months of meeting,” she said. “When I first married him, I didn’t know if it was even real. This part of him. Because I was like, ‘This is crazy. This is put on.’
“But Nick has this absolute sincerity. It inspires me every day in a profession which requires you to pivot and become whatever you need to put on. He’s constantly sincere.”
The actor has talked about taking a two-year-long break from dating before she met Jonas because she had stopped “recognising” who she was.
“I needed to know why I kept on repeating my mistakes,” she told Alex Cooper on the Call Her Daddy podcast in 2023. “And the mistake [was] always feeling like I need to be the caretaker, always feeling like it’s always OK to cancel my job, my work, my meeting or my priority to prop him up.”
“He thrives in seeing me shine; he is the most excited about the shows I’m doing,” she said of the “Leave Before You Love Me” singer.
Chopra Jonas will next be seen in The Bluff, which also stars Karl Urban, Ismael Cruz Córdova, Safia Oakley-Green, and Vedanten Naidoo, and is directed by Frank E Flowers.
