Quantico may have been cancelled before a fourth season, but Priyanka Chopra — the face of the ABC show as FBI operative Alex Parrish — continues to kick ass in Season 3 (airs every Saturday at 9pm on STAR World and STAR World HD). PC talks about the Quantico experience...
On the tenor of Quantico Season 3...
It starts at a place where history doesn’t matter. What happened to these characters doesn’t matter. It’s three years later from where we left Season 2. Everyone has gone their own way and now they come back together as a stronger, better, undercover Black Ops team which no one really knows about. That makes this sort of a sexy secret spy show which I love being a part of.
On the show returning...
I’m very excited about bringing the show back. I know we’ve taken a high risk by waiting for about a year. It’s been a long time. I would love for people to sit back and remember what they loved about the show and come in and join in on this journey which is a consolidated 13 episodes of high and adrenaline-running amazing drama.
On this season’s relevance...
Every episode you will feel like is ripped off of the news that’s happening right now, or headlines from newspapers and it’s extremely relevant and very topical. It offers solutions and a point of view to everything that is happening in the world. So, it’s amazing when television and reality sort of join hands. That’s great storytelling and I think that’s where Quantico has come this season.
On shooting internationally...
We’ve travelled a lot with this season. We’ve gone to Tuscany in Italy, we’ve gone to Dublin in Ireland, we are in New York.... I think this is a very international show. It’s really exciting to be able to cater to a really international audience with this cast as well, which is extremely diverse.
On working with Marlee Matlin...
Marlee (who plays Jocelyn Turner, an ex-FBI agent) doesn’t need any validation from any of us. She’s an Oscar-winning actress. She is supremely funny. She’s such a cool girl and a girl’s girl. She makes sure that the team is always together. She’s such a mama. She’ll take everyone out for dinner and if we’re late she’ll like text us all and be like, ‘I’m downstairs, why aren’t you here yet?’ She just keeps us all together and she’s super fun. Really sassy and so accomplished, not just in her field, but also she’s an author… she does so much to give back. She’s a woman I really look up to and admire and it’s been so wonderful to have her on this season, just to look at what a woman can do.
On Alan Powell joining the show...
Alan (who plays FBI agent Mike McQuigg) is an incredible actor. We met at the ‘chemistry read’ for the first time when I remember I was in between scenes and it was my lunch break and Michael Seitzman (producer) calls me and says, ‘Listen we have a chemistry read with two guys... do you wanna come upstairs?’ So I went up to the writers’ room and I didn’t even know my scene and I was like, ‘Hey, hey, wassup?’ I met him like that and then we did a chemistry read and I said, ‘I’m going to go back to my scene, let me know when you need me to come back for the next guy’, and Michael just said, ‘Nope, it’s done’. I was like, ‘Oh!’ That’s how Alan was cast.
On working with Jim Parsons in the film A Kid Like Jake, that releases in the US on June 8...
Jim is a wonderful producer and actor, plus he’s always super funny. We’re always talking about super interesting things that are happening in the world. He’s a really cool guy and that’s why he’s able to do the work that he does. He picks incredible projects. He’s such a wonderful actor and he can play all kinds of characters. As you will see in A Kid Like Jake, there is no trace of Sheldon (Cooper, from The Big Bang Theory). He is just completely different from Sheldon.
