Priyanka Chopra has been signed on by the American network ABC to play the female lead in the new terrorist drama series ”Quantico”.
“I took a leap of faith when [ABC head of casting] Keli Lee asked me to join the ABC family and I’m so excited to be a part of the pilot for Quantico alongside an incredibly talented cast and production team,” said the 32-year-old actress.
It has been reported that McLaughlin, also 32, will play Priyanka’s love interest on the series. The actor has previously starred on the J J Abrams and Alfonso Cuaron’s NBC drama ‘Believe’. Josh Safran of ‘Gossip Girl’ fame will pen the script and executive produce the ABC Studios and Mark Gordon Company drama alongside Mark Gordon and Nick Pepper. Marc Munden will direct the pilot.
The drama centres on a group of young FBI recruits, who battle their way through training at the Quantico base in Virginia. One of them turns out to be a “sleeper terrorist” who took part in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Priyanka will play Alex Weaver, a brilliant but haunted FBI trainee whose past boils to the surface soon after her arrival at Quantico.
A broadcast date has not yet been announced, but it is said to be in the line-up of pilots for the TV season 2015-2016.
Quantico is Chopra’s first assignment in the United States. The actress, who won the Miss Universe crown in 2000, has featured in more than 20 Bollywood films and is also a singer. She has been camping out in the US for several months hoping to break into the industry.
If Priyanka Chopra’s role stretches deep into the drama and the serial gets extended into future seasons on the lines of franchises such as Homeland, 24, The Americans, and similar thriller dramas, she’ll be onto an epic journey in entertainment.
Although several Indian-origin actors have begun to appear in TV serials (Dev Patel in Newsroom, Sakina Jaffrey in House of Cards, Annet Mahendru in The Americans, Kunal Nayyar in Big Bang Theory, Mindy Kaling in The Office, Aziz Ansari in Parks and Recreations, Senthil Ramamurthy in Heroes and Covert Affairs, Parmindar Nagra in ER, Anil Kapoor in 24 and Archana Panjabi in The Good Wife, among others), no Bollywood star has made the cut in a sustained way.
