Who is Priyanka Chopra Jonas?
Priyanka Chopra Jonas is an actor, producer, entrepreneur and former Miss World. She stars in the ongoing series “Citadel” and the film “The Bluff,” both streaming on Prime Video.
TLDR — Key Topics and Moments
- 01Priyanka Chopra Jonas discusses filming 'The Bluff', a pirate action movie with extreme violence and practical sword choreography that took months of training
- 02She trained with rubber swords for 3-4 months to become ambidextrous with blades, working alongside stunt coordinators across three simultaneous action film productions
- 03The movie explores real history of female pirates and indentured servants from India, including how the British East India Trading Company displaced millions of people
- 04Joe and Priyanka dive deep into ancient Indian temples like Kailasa temple carved from solid stone thousands of years ago with mysterious precision
- 05Discussion covers lost civilizations, the Indus Valley civilization, archaeological mysteries in Egypt including kilometer-deep structures under pyramids, and ancient texts describing advanced technology
- 06They explore theories about extraterrestrial life, the younger Dryas impact theory, and speculation about how planets support intelligent life through different evolutionary stages
The Show
Joe brings on Priyanka Chopra Jonas to talk about her new pirate film 'The Bluff' on Amazon Prime, and she comes in slightly intimidated but quickly settles into what becomes a fascinating conversation spanning history, archaeology, and ancient mysteries.
They start with the making of 'The Bluff', where Priyanka trained extensively with swords to play a female pirate. She explains that she approached sword choreography like dance choreography, treating it similarly to how Bollywood films handle action sequences. The real work was intense: she trained for 3-4 months with rubber swords, becoming ambidextrous with different weapon weights. During filming, they shot 10 hours a day for a week straight doing fight sequences on a bluff in the Cayman Islands. The filmmakers built everything practically, including replica ships from the 1900s, to avoid heavy VFX work. Priyanka notes that Carl Urban, her co-star, had experience from Lord of the Rings sword work, so she really pushed herself to match his skill level.
The conversation pivots to the historical context of the movie. Priyanka's character comes from indentured servants who were displaced from India, a real practice where young people were promised opportunities then dropped in the Caribbean or elsewhere. She researched actual female pirates like Grace Ali, Mary Reed, and Ching Xi, and discovered fascinating layers about how the British East India Trading Company actually hired pirates to help them conquer new lands, then vilified and hunted those same pirates once piracy became inconvenient. This leads Joe down a rabbit hole about the East India Trading Company being one of the first publicly traded corporations, involved in slavery, the opium trade, wars with China over Hong Kong, and essentially controlling India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh until the British government finally nationalized it.
From there, the conversation expands to colonization broadly. Joe brings up his recent deep dive into Mexican history, where over 100 languages were completely lost when 600 Spanish conquistadors essentially took over the Aztec Empire. Priyanka talks about India being invaded repeatedly over thousands of years by the Portuguese, British, and Moguls, and how that created the insane diversity in India today. She explains that there are 28-30 major languages spoken in India with completely different alphabets and sounds, plus hundreds of dialects. She can speak English, Hindi, understands some Punjabi and Marathi, but traveling to other states means complete language barriers.
This sparks Joe's enthusiasm about visiting India to see the ancient temples, particularly the Kailasa temple carved entirely from one piece of stone. They pull up images and Joe is blown away by the precision involved. The temple is carved into a mountain, completely subtractive work with no blocks added on, meaning any mistake is permanent. Priyanka brings up other temple complexes and mysterious ancient structures in India, carved thousands of years ago with seemingly impossible precision for the tools they supposedly had.
From there, Joe launches into discussions about similar archaeological mysteries worldwide. He talks about Sacsayhuaman in Peru where 100-ton stones are carved in jigsaw patterns to absorb earthquake energy, and how we don't really know who built those structures before the Incas. He mentions an Italian scientist named Filipo Bondi who used radio Doppler tomography satellite imaging on Egyptian pyramids and found massive structures underground going over a kilometer down with 20-meter diameter columns wrapped in circular coils. Nobody knows what these are or who made them. He also discusses the Tonguska event in 1908 where a meteor exploded above Russia and flattened a million acres with no trees growing back even today.
The discussion moves to whether we're alone in the universe, which they both reject as human arrogance. Joe brings up Terrence Howard's theory about how planets move away from their sun at different rates, creating goldilocks zones where intelligent life emerges, eventually figures out it needs to leave, and spreads throughout the universe. They discuss how our sun is slowly burning out and we're passing through comet storms, mentioning the younger Dryas impact theory around 11,800 years ago and earlier asteroid collisions that reshaped Earth's history.
Key Moments
Best Quotes
"I treat sort of fight sequences like dancing. You learn the choreography but that doesn't stop your face from telling the story."
"They utilized pirates in order to take over new lands, right? And in their conquests. And then when piracy was abolished, they went after them and they vilified the same people that helped them build their entire empire."
"India is like hyper diverse because of how many people have kind of made it her roots. An Indian face does not look like a particular person."
"We are a species with amnesia. And we just don't understand how advanced ancient civilizations may have been."
"I don't think that's possible that we're the only species in the universe. It's human arrogance if we think we are."
Products and Books Mentioned
Everything brought up in this episode — linked to Amazon.
Citadel
AmazonOngoing Amazon Prime Video series starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas
The Bluff
AmazonAmazon Prime Video pirate action film starring Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Karl Urban
Heads of State
AmazonAmazon action film that Priyanka filmed alongside The Bluff
AG1
AmazonDaily health drink combining multivitamin, pre and probiotics, superfoods, and antioxidants
Perplexity
AmazonAI search engine app offering a free welcome kit at pplx.ai/rogan
TurboTax
AmazonTax preparation software from Intuit
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
Full Transcript (click to expand)
Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. >> The Joe Rogan Experience. >> TRAIN BY DAY. JOE ROGAN PODCAST BY NIGHT. All day. >> I won't lie. I am nervous to talk to >> Come on. >> How can you be nervous? That's ridiculous. >> Like I came in slightly intimidated. >> Why? >> I actually don't know the answer to that because we've never met. Yeah. So, it's not like you've intimidated me, but I just I'm really um I think I what I really enjoy about your show is just such an eclectic perspective on so many diverse things and it comes like so naturally to you. Um I really admire that. >> Well, fortunately I don't have anybody pick my guests, so it's all people that I'm actually interested in talking to. So, it's easy. >> It's just stuff. >> Thank you for for picking me. >> Oh, my pleasure. I'm excited to talk to you. I your movie is crazy. Like I knew it was a pilot a pirate movie, but I I just did not expect the ultra violence. Like from the beginning I was like, yo, like I locked in immediately. I was like first scene I was like, "Holy shit." >> Like this is crazy. >> Well, thank you. That's >> what was that like to I mean is it >> when you're doing something that's that hyper violent? Like is that does that freak you out at all? like you're cutting people open with swords and stabbing them in the neck and it's like holy >> When you're doing it, you know, it's like make believe. So, it's so much fun to be like, "Yeah, PLAYING PIRATES AND I'M GOING TO behead you." But um I mean in moments of like scenes and stuff where I actually had to think about what it must have been like to be a female at that time or because they existed women female pirates existed and we just we didn't hear many much about stories about them. I mean, I heard about Grace Ali, maybe um there were Mary Reed, like a few famous ones. Um Ching Xi after I did my research. But like in those moments, you're like, "This stuff must have like this was real. They lived at a time where it was >> survival of the fittest. It was barbaric." Um and I wonder what that must have been like. But besides that, the stunts and stuff, like I really have so much admiration for the amount of um precision it requires to pull that stuff off from so many people, not just the stunt department, but like the cameras because they're also moving in sync with you. >> Yeah. >> Um and that's cool. >> It is cool. Is it hard to stay in the moment when all that is happening? Because you have so much coordination and so there's there's so much choreography. There's like he's going to swing this way and you're going to block it and you're going to dive down. There's like it's so complex. Like these are long extended fight scenes. >> We had like a lot of wonders too like full the whole scene in one shot. >> Whoa. um which Frankie, our director, really loved the idea of and I honestly love it because it it brings you into that that moment is so enriched with everything that you're supposed to feel between action and cut. So I do love a long Warner. Um but you know I come from Bollywood movies so we have a lot of choreography choreography for like dance sequences where stories are also moving forward like between you know your exchange of expression or something's happening somewhere else you come back. So I treat sort of fight sequences like dancing. >> It's you learn the choreography but that doesn't stop your face from telling the story. >> Right. That makes sense. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. And I mean it is kind I mean it's just choreography whether it's choreography with dance or choreography with movements with your hands and swords. >> I had never worked with blades before this movie though. That was cool. >> How much training did you have to do? Like when you found out that you're going to take the role. >> Yeah. >> Um how much preparation did you have to do physically to get ready for all that stuff? >> It was a cool year for me because I was filming three jobs which were all action and stunts. So this movie called Heads of State, which I did >> for Amazon again, and then Citadel and this movie. So it was a year of three action jobs. So the, you know, being agile and being in it was already part of what I was doing because that's what I was filming every day. But the swords training was tough and to be ambidextrous with it as well. Um, so I had um my my stunt coordinator who was doing all three movies with me. She in between shots, she and I would just take our rubber swords out and do like choreography and rehearsals and >> but like it took at least three or four months of just staying in it and getting loose with it. Also because Carl Urban, my co- actor had >> casual learned uh how to do like sword fights in the Lord of the Rings. >> So he was amazing at it. So I didn't, you know, in that last duel I didn't want to be any less than, so I kind of went at it. >> No, you look very good at it. It was really good. So I was like, did you work with some sort of like a kendo specialist or uh some f...
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