Their bad! ABC’s Nightline made an embarrassing blunder on Tuesday, Sept. 29, when the news program mistakenly used footage of Indian actress Yukta Mookhey in place of Priyanka Chopra for a special feature segment on Chopra’s new role on the network’s new crime series Quantico.
In the since-edited story, Nightline erroneously included a clip of Mookhey being crowned Miss World in 1999. Chopra, 33, was crowned Miss World in 2000.
Several eagle-eyed fans were quick to call out the error.
“Uh oh, @Nightline! That’s Yukta Mokhey when she was crowned Miss World. Not @priyankachopra!” fashion blog High Heel Confidential pointed out on Twitter.
“Whoops, ABC promoted their new show with a photo of the wrong Indian woman,” another Twitter user noted.
“Our sincerest apologies @priyankachopra,” Nightline tweeted after the mistake was brought to their attention, with a link to the corrected video.
“Thank you for the correction @Nightline,” the actress wrote in her retweet of the apology.
Ironically, the show’s segment discussed Chopra’s big break into Hollywood and how she has had to fight against prejudice and racial stereotypes in the media.
When she became the voice for NFL’s Thursday night football in 2013 with her single “In My City,” for instance, she faced plenty of racist remarks.
“There was a lot of these terrorist comments that called me an ‘Arab terrorist,’” she said on the Nightline segment. “I was offended on two accounts: one, why is every Arab a terrorist? And second of all, how am I an Arab? I’m Indian.”
Not that she’s going to let ignorant views get her down, Chopra said, adding that her lead role on Quantico, as CIA agent Alex Parrish, proves that progress is being made.
“A lot of the shows have always been inside the box,” she said in the interview. “I like to think outside the box… [I liked my character on Quantico because] she was ethnically ambiguous, [and] I wanted to be taken seriously as an actor and not for the color of my skin.”
