It’s not news that Priyanka Chopra‘s Bollywood comeback was supposed to be with superstar Salman Khan up until Nick Jonas got down on one knee and popped the question. And it was, in fact, the director of Bharat Ali Abbas Zafar who broke the news of PeeCee getting engaged with his tweet. While the director took the news in the right spirit, looks like Salman still thinks it was embarrassing for PeeCee to back out of such a large scale movie to simply get married. In a recent media interaction, Salman revealed how Katrina Kaif who is currently the female lead of the film was always his first choice but they went with PeeCee only because she had shown interest in the project.
Talking about the same, he said:
Initially, Priyanka was very keen to do this film. Ali (director Ali Abbas Zafar) and we all thought it was Katrina Kaif’s film. But Katrina and I did Tiger Zinda Hai just before that and Ali said that we need a girl who is ‘Hindustani.’I tried telling him, ‘Why can’t she (Katrina) pull off this role? She has been living in India for the last 20 years.’ But then Ali said, ‘Priyanka ka phone aaya tha‘ and it is also true that Priyanka and my sister Arpita Khan are good friends. After all this, the ‘Nick story’ happened, the embarrassing thing happened and she chose to get married.
He also revealed that PeeCee might have thought he would be upset with her when she told him the news.
Look, she did the right thing. She did what she wanted, and Katrina got what she deserved. She informed us five days before the schedule was supposed to start… she must have thought that in this way I would get upset with her and will never work with her.
He further added:
She spoke to me saying, ‘Nick (American actor-singer Nick Jonas) has proposed to me and I want to get married, so there will be some date issues’. I said, ‘Sure, get married, we can adjust those two, three days. Then she said that she does not want to do the film.
Salman and Katrina are currently on a promotional spree for their upcoming movie and questions about PeeCee being the first choice have been unavoidable. While Salman has maintained that he is okay with her decision to back out of his movie, you cannot ignore the shade that he seems to be throwing her way. In a recent media interaction, he even thanked the actress for backing out so Kat could take her place. While Salman has repeatedly said that Priyanka is a hard-working actress, you can’t really ignore the passive aggression here.