The actress said the moment was 'like a meet-cute from a movie.'
Priyanka Chopra is opening up about her and Nick Jonas' love story. When the couple first met in 2016, the Jonas Brothers singer made quite the impression on his now-wife.
The meeting came at Vanity Fair's Oscars party. Jonas previously told Vogue of the encounter, "I put my drink down, get on one knee -- this is in front of a bunch of people -- and I say, 'You're real. Where have you been all my life?' Like, loud."
"It was such a Prince Charming moment," Chopra admitted on SiriusXM's The Howard Stern Show. "It was like time stopped. And also he was so hot and I didn't know him... It was really like a meet-cute from a movie. He just held my hand and I turned around and he was in a suit and he goes down on his knees and I think time stopped."
Months later, Jonas slid into Chopra's DMs and she handed over her phone number.
"We were texting. He asked me out on a few amazing dates. One of them was [to] the White House," she said, before revealing why she turned him down. "I was afraid of getting into anything at that time. I was afraid of getting my heart broken. I had just been through the ringer."
Then, in 2017, the pair happened to cross paths at the Met Gala.
"At the Met Gala, where we didn't go with each other, somehow we landed at the same time on the carpet. I was adjusting my dress and I look up and it was like, oh, of course it's Nick at the Met Gala at the same time as me," Chopra said. "We talked a little bit and he was like, 'Let's just give it a real shot.' And I was like, 'Yeah, sure, of course.'"
However, Chopra "wasn't looking for a relationship at that time" because she "just didn't have ground under my feet." By the next May, however, Jonas convinced Chopra to go on a date with him.
"He was smart. He told me, 'I have a few tickets. I'm going with my friends if you would like to come.' So he disarmed me by not having the pressure of just him and I. He had three of his friends. I brought a friend of mine," she said. "We went to see Beauty and the Beast at the Hollywood Bowl. It was beautiful."
While Chopra "wanted to play it cool" by sporting jeans and a jacket to the group hang -- "He's a rock star and everything. You don't want to play all your cards." -- she was smitten after that night together.
"That night we spent so many hours, just eight hours or something ... Him and I were just by each other's side," she recalled. "He asked me the next day to go to a Dodgers game. I don't know my baseball from my football. I'm a little bit unaware, but I was very excited to go have alone time with him. I felt butterflies. I woke up early. It was just a feeling I hadn't felt in a long time. It was just uphill from there."
Their love story got even more romantic when Jonas penned a song for Chopra, with the actress joking, "The first time he did that, Howard, that was a good night for him."
"[He] plays this song and uses words and phrases that are very me, and phrases that I have used. I didn't want to presume it, so I didn't say anything. I was like, 'Oh, that's an awesome song,'" she said. "And he was like, 'Yeah, does it sound familiar?' And I was like, 'A few words.' And he's like, 'Well, I wrote this for you.'"
Jonas "sealed the deal" when he told Chopra, "I'm not a man of too many words, but my songs will be my love letters to you."
By July 2018, the couple was engaged. They tied the knot before the end of that year, and then welcomed their daughter, Malti, in January 2022. "When you know, you know," Chopra reasoned.
The pair has been going strong since, even stepping out to attend the Met Gala together.
"For us, it was the beginning of our love story," Jonas told Vogue at the event. "... It's pretty wild. And here we are now."
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