No one would ever not call Priyanka Chopra ambitious. She’s currently in NYC filming the second season of Quantico and we will all see her make her Hollywood film debut in the upcoming Baywatch remake. Despite her busy schedule, she recently shot for FLARE magazine and did a live chat with the magazine and her fans on Facebook.

Here are some of the excerpts from her interview.

On her beauty pageant start:

Priyanka had set her sights on studying engineering but her mother sent her head shots to the Miss India pageant. “I just went to the pageant to skip my exams,” she explains. “It wasn’t my dream to be a pageant queen. It was just drive. I don’t like losing.”

On politics and social issues:

She loves Canadian PM Justin Trudeau and is very opinionated on social issues like condemning violence against women and female genital mutilation. Her acute interest in world issues came from her family, with whom she is still exceptionally close—her mother often travels with her for projects across the world, and her only tattoo is a commemoration of her late father: “Daddy’s lil girl,” traced up her wrist from his own handwriting. “My parents raised me to be a thinking girl,” she says. “Our dinner table discussions were always, ‘What are the relevant issues right now?’”

On acting:

“It’s a great time to be a female actor right now, especially if you stand your ground,” she says, “I won’t settle.”

On her new found celebrity in America:

“Mainstream America is getting to know me through Quantico, and now they’re discovering my Indian films,” she says. “It’s such a cool cultural exchange for me, because I get people writing to me, saying, ‘We watched our first Indian movie on Netflix.’ I feel amazing that I’ve been able to introduce a new audience to those films—and an Indian audience to an American show.”

On being stereotyped:

“Storytelling cannot be based on what someone looks like,” she says. “Everyone has stories: you have a story; I have a story. They just need to be written. And casting needs to happen based on the best person for the job, not the Indian girl or the black girl. The girl next door is no longer blonde-haired and blue-eyed, nor is she brown-haired and brown-eyed. She’s not one person. And our entertainment needs to be a representation of that.”

On the infamous over-airbrushed armpit on Maxim India:

Rather than making a big deal out of it, she responded by posting an unfiltered pic of her pit with the hashtag #WillTheRealArmpitPleaseStandUp. “That’s when you know you’ve made it,” she jokes. “When your armpit is trending.”

To read the full interview, pick up Flare magazine on the stands now or go to flare.com!

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