Priyanka Chopra has sailed several seas in her multi-decade career, from winning Miss World in 2000 to conquering Bollywood to her recent rebirth as Hollywood action star. And yet it’s her blood-soaked turn as a seriously gnarly ex-pirate in The Bluff that could be her most personal yet: that of a mum who will kill to protect her family.
Speaking to , Chopra recalls reading the script for the new Prime Video pirate epic when her daughter was a toddler. The first thought that followed the first read was, she remembers: ‘How far would you go to protect your children?’
So how far would she go, I ask mildly? ‘I would rip someone in half to protect my family,’ comes the response. ‘I know I would find that rage within me to be able to do that. And that was my North Star in this movie.’ She even switches to Hindi to reinforce the point: ‘Mai keher macha dungi’.
It means: ‘I will wreak havoc.’ And, boy, does she.
Bringing the pain
Based on a real era in maritime history and on some of the salty – and eye-wateringly violent – buccaneers who populated it, The Bluff casts Chopra as a retired marauder called Ercell ‘Bloody Mary’ Bodden. And she hasn’t earned that nickname for her love of vodka and tomato juice: in writer-director Frank E Flowers’ gory action film, Chopra brings the pain in truly R-rated fashion.
The story sees Karl Urban’s menacing, sleazy Captain Connor (think The Boys’ Billy Butcher on about a gallon of rum) land on her quiet Cayman Islands home with his seafaring confederates. It’s the late 19th century and these pirates of the Caribbean are frantically trying to keep the dying embers of the so-called ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ glowing. Some, like Ercell, are seeking new lives. In the spirit of all good Hollywood action films, their pasts will catch up with them.
I’d never worked with blades before so I had to train in [different] sword-fighting styles
When her young son is threatened, those feral instincts kick back in – and then some. Things to look out for: Chopra butchering some of Connor’s crew in a cave, and braining his henchmen with a conch shell. Pirates of the Caribbean, this isn’t.
Fighting to the death
Yet, for all the sword-fighting and swashbuckling, The Bluff isn’t your average pirate film. Most of the action unfurls on the island rather than aboard galleons on the high seas. Flowers, a Cayman Islander himself, calls it a ‘home invasion thriller’ in the mold of Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs. Straw Seadogs, perhaps?
The writer-director compares Chopra’s vengeful warrioress with Clint Eastwood’s ageing gunslinger-turned-cowboy in Unforgiven. ‘She’s a farmer on the range,’ he tells . ‘She’s not proud of her complex and dark past. When the danger comes, all she wants to do is walk away but they won’t let her. So she has to be more visceral.’
The Bluff’s out-there action sequences aren’t Chopra’s first rodeo. She’s played gun-wielding agents mode in Quantico and Citadel, and in 2024 action-comedy Heads of State, she was an MI6 agent defending Idris Elba’s UK Prime Minister and John Cena’s US President from terrorists. None of those required her to use a coconut grater in anger, however. ‘There’s a single shot where I’m [being] stealthy in the dark and I have five or six kills along the way,’ she notes. ‘I kill someone with a rope and hang them. I stab someone in the neck.’ They’re the ‘little things’ – her words – that have given Bloody Mary her name.
The film’s makeshift arsenal also includes antique knives, shotguns and, well, whatever comes to hand. Fundamentally, though, The Bluff sits in the long line of pirate movies dating back to Errol Flynn: it’s all about the swords. ‘I’d never worked with blades before,’ remembers Chopra, ‘so I had to train in [different] sword-fighting styles.’
She crammed in 20-minute sword-fighting sessions during breaks on the set of Heads of State, and had Pirates of the Caribbean stunt coordinator Rob Alonzo and stunt double Anisha Gibbs supporting her during The Bluff’s six-days-a-week, two-and-a-half month shoot in Australia. The action still took a physical toll. ‘Magnesium soaks, arnica cream on bruises, antibiotics for cuts and feet in hot water’ are Chopra’s recovery tips. Oh, and the odd hug. ‘I needed it,’ she laughs. Her daughter was present during filming, with her pop star/actor husband Nick Jonas flying in to lend moral support.
A homage to the Cayman Islands
Sticking close to his roots, Flowers zeroed in on the easternmost of the Cayman Islands, Cayman Brac, as the movie’s setting. This rugged land mass lends the film its title: the island’s 141-feet limestone outcrop is known as ‘The Bluff’.
The Gold Coast and other Queensland locations double for the Caribbean on screen, but the film is still alive with the spirit and history of the Caymans. Even Ercell’s coconut grater holds significance to the local cuisine. Flowers’ pirate obsession dates back to his boyhood on the islands, where Pirates Week is a national festival. ‘We didn’t really dress up for Halloween,’ he remembers, ‘but we [did] for Pirates Week. I remember sitting on my dad’s shoulders, and [seeing] the ships sailing into town, pyrotechnics and sword fights.’
Seeing the towering Bluff again as an adult convinced him to set his bloody pirate epic on Cayman Brac. Queensland’s North Stradbroke Island is its stand-in, with the help of what Flowers calls a ‘theme park of [our] own movie’ – 19th century sets that included sprawling sugarcane plantations, banana stalls, wooden churches and dockyards.
You can’t take the Bollywood out of me
While Flowers researched letters by old settlers of Cayman, Chopra dug deep into the lives of female pirates like Britain’s Mary Reed and Ireland’s Grace O’Malley. She paid a visit to the Caymans ahead of production, too. Flowers’ screenplay (co-written with his college classmate Joe Ballarini) frames her character in the historical context of indentured slaves and servants taken from India to the Caribbean. ‘My character’s story starts like that with her family kidnapped by the East India Company traders,’ explains Chopra. ‘I wanted to get into the story of that displacement and what it feels like when you don’t have your roots or an identity.’
Chopra didn’t draw those direct connections with her homeland during filming – ‘I wanted to be true to my character whose Indian roots were forgotten because she was abducted and she lost her parents when she was so young’ – but even her friends have noted hints of Bollywood in some of Bloody Mary’s close-ups. ‘Hindi cinema is where I learned my craft and I’m very proud of it,’ she says. ‘You can’t take the Bollywood out of me.’
The Bluff is produced by Marvel duo Joe and Anthony Russo and boasts Oscar-winner Zoe Saldaña, once touted to play Bloody Mary, as another producer. Would Chopra be up for filming a sequel with the Avatar star? ‘That would be the dream,’ she laughs. ‘Zoe’s such a sister and icon in the genre.’
Next up for Chopra is a comeback in Indian cinema with the hotly-anticipated Varanasi, SS Rajamouli’s follow-up to his Telugu-language action epic RRR. Just don’t expect her to give up any of its treasure at this point. ‘I’m sure there are many things that I will take from The Bluff on to Varanasi and anything else that I do going forward,’ she straight-bats.
Question is: will it involve beating more baddies to a pulp with a conch shell?
The Bluff streams on Prime Video worldwide from February 25.
The 101 best action movies of all time.
The best movies of 2026 (so far).
