Priyanka Chopra is charismatic but diplomatic; you feel that she’s paying careful attention to you even when she’s the one talking. Her manager calls this “an international swag,” while the head of casting at ABC calls it “star quality.” It’s there in Quantico, too, with Chopra playing Alex Parrish, an F.B.I. recruit whose “I’m better than anyone else” confidence leads Chopra to call her “a female Jason Bourne.” The pilot, which airs on ABC Sunday night, is promising, part “spies go to college” flashbacks and part suspenseful fugitive story with a meaningful subversion: a brown woman on the run to clear her name after being wrongly accused of terrorism.

This wasn’t exactly the case when Chopra, a former Miss World and major Bollywood star, first received the script. “Alex could’ve been from any country actually. She could’ve been Yugoslavian, British, she could’ve been of any race, and that’s the beauty of this–it’s ethnically ambiguous.” She does clarify–and the pilot makes it clear–that the character is half Indian and half white American. “The beauty of Alex is that she’s someone little girls can look up to and say,‘Hey, that’s a cool part.’”

Chopra is no stranger to Quantico’s fight sequences (she points out “war scars” from her role as the titular boxer in the biopic Mary Kom), but she’s more excited for the spy craft. “Picking up things from somewhere, figuring out clues . . . she’s really good at that.” I point out that most of those “deductive” roles tend to be rich white men, like Sherlock or House. She grins and gestures to herself. “Well, I’m not a rich white dude at any angle!”

“When I was in school, you never saw anyone who looked like us that was on TV.”

Chopra was born in India and moved to Boston at age 13, living with her aunt and uncle. “When I was in school, you never saw anyone who looked like us that was on TV,” she says. “And that was really weird for me because there’s so many people of South Asian descent in America–in the world.” Chopra returned to India for her senior year of high school, partly due to problems with bullying, and predicts that if she hadn’t, she would have become an aeronautical engineer. Instead, she became Miss India and eventually Miss World. “I think [my bully in high school] helped me do that,” Chopra says.

Chopra is the one and only client of manager Anjula Acharia-Bath, who founded Desi Hits to connect South Asian musicians with Hollywood producers. Acharia-Bath, who recalls growing up in the U.K. and seeing few South Asians on TV, calls Chopra her “passion project”; she advised ABC’s casting exec Keli Lee to fly to Mumbai and persuade Chopra to meet with her.

It wasn’t exactly an easy sell—Chopra is excited about the chance to be a South Asian face on American television, but not necessarily American stardom. “I didn’t have like this ‘I want to make it in America’ kind of thing,” she explains. “I just wanted to expand my horizons. I didn’t need to do anything unless it happened to be the right thing.” She made this clear to Lee. “So I told her, the only way I would do it is if you find me a show and a path which first will put me in the same position that I am in India.”

By Craig Sjodin/Courtesy of ABC

Lee, like Acharia-Bath and Chopra, spent her childhood looking in vain for her own face reflected on TV. “I’m a Korean immigrant. My family came here when I was two years old. I think this is why we all connected on such a personal level,” she says. “That we want to watch television to see stories about people that look like us, so that we can relate.” Lee is the brains behind getting Sandra Oh on Grey’s Anatomy, Sofía Vergara in Modern Family, and Kerry Washington in Scandal. She also directed the ABC Talent Showcase program, where selected actors and actresses can show off their talents to industry professionals, which gifted the world talent such as Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o and Golden Globe winner Gina Rodriguez.