‘Salman Khan couldn’t act, Priyanka Chopra was dark and had bad skin,’ says Prahlad Kakkar

Ad guru Prahlad Kakkar described Priyanka Chopra as a 'doll', but said that she needed to do a lot of hard work to look petite in Dostana as she was a 'big-boned girl'.

By: Entertainment Desk

New Delhi | September 18, 2025 04:27 PM IST

3 min read

Priyanka Chopra won the Miss World pageant before making her Bollywood debut. (Photo: Express Archive)

Ad guru Prahlad Kakkar spoke about Priyanka Chopra’s rise in the film industry, and said that he always knew that she had an edge over Lara Dutta, with whom she was pitted at the start of her career. Priyanka won the Miss World pageant before joining the film industry, and broke out as a major star in the mid-2000s. In an interview, Prahlad praised her for maintaining her dignity despite having mud slung at her, and for making it in Hollywood after she stopped getting meaningful work in the Hindi industry.

In a chat with Vickey Lalwani, Prahlad said that he always knew Priyanka would have a bigger career than Lara, despite the disadvantages that she was dealing with. “Priyanka had huge disadvantages at that time. Firstly, she was dark. Secondly, she had bad skin. She still does. Her skin had to be made-up and covered. She was a strong-looking girl. She lost a lot of weight to look like the way she did in Dostana. She looked like a million dollars in Dostana. She worked damn hard at it, because she’s not a delicate looking girl. She’s a big-boned girl,” he said.

Also read – ‘Salman Khan is a proven criminal, he had the image of a chhichhora and mawaali’: Dabangg director Abhinav Kashyap doubles down against Khan family

In the same interview, Prahlad also commented on Salman Khan’s disadvantages before he became an overnight sensation with the success of his debut film, Maine Pyar Kiya. He said, “Salman used to be on my sets all the time because he was very good friends with my wife. He was not even a struggler then; he’d done nothing in life… He was a good-looking boy, but he wasn’t star material, as far as I was concerned because he had lots of issues. He was short, he wasn’t a great actor at that time. We needed people to perform. But we used a lot of him, because he would do it for Rs 2,000 or Rs 3,000.”

Prahlad mentioned the allegations of abuse that were made against Salman when he was said to be seeing Aishwarya, and he claimed to have been a witness to some of their altercations because he lived in the same building as her. “I was living in the same building! He would make scenes in the foyer. He would bang his head at the wall. The relationship had ended long before it ended. It was a relief for everybody; her parents, her, everybody. She wasn’t upset about the break-up. She was upset about being completely… Everybody took Salman’s side and not hers,” he said.

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