“I’ve been famous for more than half my life,” Chopra shrugs, as her makeup artist glams her up mid-sentence, and two assistants hover nearby. “I don’t know anything else anymore. This is my normal.”

She recalls her origins as if they were a lifetime ago. Even before she was an inter-continental star, cultural division was a defining factor of Chopra’s life. At 13, she left her family in India to study in the United States, living with her aunt and uncle in Newton, Mass. But being a gawky teenager and the only Indian girl at school wasn’t without its challenges, namely, xenophobic encounters that proved too suffocating and dispiriting to endure. “I was bullied by a freshman named Jeanine,” she tells me, emphasizing the added shame of being picked on by a younger girl. “She was black, and supremely racist. Jeanine used to say, ‘Brownie, go back to your country, you smell of curry,’ or ‘Do you smell curry coming?’ You know when you’re a kid, and you’re made to feel bad about where your roots are, or what you look like? You don’t understand it, you just feel bad about who you are.”

The bullying tested her resolve and broke it. “I told my mom, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’” She returned to India defeated, her mind set on becoming an engineer despite her burgeoning movie-star looks. Then, when she applied for a scholarship, her mother sent professionally shot photos to the Miss India pageant without telling her. To her surprise, she won. “The thing is,” she tells me while recalling the start of her career, “I don’t like losing, in anything I do, whatever it might be. I felt I could always go back to college. But this was something I wanted to try so that I didn’t have a ‘what-if’ for the rest of my life.”

Now she’s got close to six-dozen films under her belt and counting. She’s based her career on an in-born, screen-queen magnetism, the wildly unattainable beauty wedded to the girl next door. I can feel it as I sit next to her in her trailer, and later on set between takes. As she speaks to her assistants, her husky voice seamlessly oscillating between alluring and respectfully commanding, she pushes her thick, wavy brown hair to the side while her lips part into a beaming wide smile.

“It is that superstar quality,” Safran told me later. “That Julia Roberts quality, that Meg Ryan quality, that thing of Sandra Bullock. You feel like you could actually know them, but you also know that you could never know them. She’s living on two different levels at once. That’s what I like so much about her. She’s not untouchable in any way even though she looks like a goddess. I think that’s really rare. It’s like lightning in a bottle.”

Even rarer is how she manages to distill that A-list aura into a tangible relatability, something she’s been doubling down on with each public appearance. Like, for example, pitching a hot wing face-off to Jimmy Fallon for her appearance on The Tonight Show—and bodying him. That sense of approachability readily translates in real life. But to what end? Is she riding the wave, or playing a larger game?

For the past several months, she’s been filming Quantico during the week, and flying back to Mumbai on weekends to continue dominating Hindi cinema, or more recently, down south to film Baywatch. Once an outcast, she’s now on her way to becoming America’s next sweetheart, and she didn’t even trade in her cinematic citizenship. This isn’t her “crossing over” to America, an assumption she’s somewhat offended by. After all, ABC came to her, offering their full slate of scripts in development to choose from. Not the other way around.

Instead what she’s doing is more like multi-lane road hogging, and that’s without even factoring in her music career. She has 45 songs on her laptop, all of varying genre and sound, recorded with people like Pitbull and will.i.am. She’s even got a rain check for a studio session with Pharrell—she just hasn’t found the time in between an Indian movie, American television, and an American movie to call in the favor. “Nineties music has influenced me tremendously. Movies became my profession, but music was always my heart, in a way, my passion.” Which explains why she specifically requested a 2Pac playlist during the photo shoot for this story. (She walked out to “Ambitionz Az a Ridah”—another incidentally perfect moment.) “I was supposed to be Mrs. Shakur. Then he died. Yeah, I wore black to school for 30 days.”