During a chat with InStyle editor-in-chief for an episode of Ladies First with Laura Brown podcast, Priyanka Chopra shared how she overcame “tricky” long-distance difficulties with Nick Jonas during the pandemic.
Spread out across different continents during the COVID pandemic, Priyanka spent the year in London shooting the upcoming series Citadel, while her husband was home in Los Angeles.
“This year has been really tough,” Chopra started. “It was really, really tough to be away from home for an entire year, especially at a time where you can’t travel to see your family. Just the uncertainty of my mom and my brother being in India, my husband being in America, while I was in the U.K., it was just so much uncertainty, and that, to me, was terrifying, of not being able to just get on a flight and travel just in case something went wrong or something happened. But thankfully everyone was okay.”
She went on to note … “I think what it really taught me was a little bit of gratitude but I’ve had rock bottom moments, I know, while I was in the U.K. Even going for a walk seemed so dreary sometimes because all the restaurants would be closed and all the streets were closed. It felt so apocalyptic. And I was just alone at home.”
Unlike so many, which Chopra did acknowledge, she and Jonas were in fact able to see each other, but obviously precautions had to be taken.
“We didn’t have a dramatic separation but because he was in and out, we had to be really careful,” she said. “He had to quarantine; I had to quarantine whenever we saw each other at that time, and that’s usually not conducive to a production schedule because you don’t really have much time. You have like, two days off. So it was all really tricky but we managed. He flew out a bunch of times; I flew down a couple times. My mom came and stayed with me for almost five months, which was really nice.”
Pandemic problems or not, Chopra said that generally she and Jonas “talk all the time.” “We know each other’s hearts, we prioritize each other in everything that we do.”
“We’ve had individual careers, and we’re both very clear about never interfering in each other’s professional lives because we’re always partners and assets. We’ll have an opinion on each other’s thing; we’ll be each other’s champions, but those decisions are predominately for both of us to take because we’ve built our careers by ourselves for such a long time.”
That said, she noted that “at the same time, it’s really important to keep a check on the other person’s heart and how they’re feeling and prioritizing that and I have to say, my husband’s amazing at doing that. Like I said, this year was hard for me being in London. He would just drop everything, come in for even like, a day, just have dinner with me, and then fly back. Stuff like that, you just have to prioritize each other and then everything feels right.”
