The Hot List 2016: Priyanka Bose (Actor)

“I don’t like being anyone’s girlfriend, wife, ”˜hot’ or ”˜sexy’. I am nothing. I’m only an actress,” says Priyanka Bose. Photo: Shivaji Sen

A surprise visitor came to the New York premiere of the Weinstein Company-produced real-life
adaptation of Lion, former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Understandably, not just because the story of a young Indian””played by Dev Patel””who’s lived with his adopted family in Australia and returns to India to find his biological mother””Priyanka Bose ””has humanitarian and social themes but also because it’s quickly gaining Oscar buzz. She says about her involvement, “I didn’t have management at the time, so I literally put a wish out there into the universe. I know it sounds so cheesy, but everyone came into the project by sheer serendipity.”

For Bose, a model, actor and all- round familiar face from advertisements and films, this can’t be entirely new. She’d already been in the international film festival spotlight after 2014’s Sold, which traversed child sex trafficking. Bose says emphatically that labels don’t matter to her. “I don’t like being anyone’s girlfriend, wife, ”˜hot’ or ”˜sexy’. I am nothing. I’m only an actress, and trying to be a better person, devoid of any gender, trying to make everything count and not be hard on myself.” Of course, she has nothing against commercial cinema. She only knows indie and mainstream films in terms of budget. She says, “I’ve gone through burnout supporting a lot of films with bad budgets. Sure, I would like better scripts and parts written for me with amazing budgets. That will be the full circle for me.”