Actress Priyanka Chopra is being slammed for saying that RRR is a Tamil film. She was speaking in an interview with an American podcast 'Armchair Expert Podcast' which was released on Spotify on Tuesday.
Speaking about Bollywood, she said: "Bollywood has evolved in such an incredible way, where you have that mainstream, big movie which is like, big actors and the action and the love story and the dancing." When the host Dax Shepard said that he saw RRR, Priyanka said that it is a Tamil film. "That’s a Tamil movie by the way. That's like a big, mega, blockbuster Tamil movie, which does all of those things. It’s like our Avengers."
She was likely referring to American TV host Jimmy Kimmel calling RRR a Bollywood movie while hosting the Oscars. He was also criticised at the time. She may have also been correcting Shepard’s assumption that RRR is a Bollywood film. Priyanka's effort to clarify which Indian film industry RRR belongs to was in vain because she also got it wrong.
In January, director SS Rajamouli spoke to a group of American journalists and asserted that RRR is "a Telugu film that comes from the south of India" and "not a Bollywood movie."
Many took to Twitter to express disappointment and said that she could have done some research before talking on the show. Some said she could have called it a south Indian or Indian film if she didn't know exactly which industry RRR came from. One user said that it is annoying when every Indian movie is assumed to be from Bollywood. It is also annoying when people cannot differentiate between Tamil and Telugu.