Sunny Leone: Star of India

When the interview is over, three fans—a man and two women—approach Leone and ask to take a picture with her. She obliges. As she returns to the set, I ask them how Leone won them over with her part on Bigg Boss. “I found her cute, actually,” one of the women says. “She was really down-to-earth,” the other adds. The man chimes in: “She is one bold Indian,” he says. “One bold Indian.” Leone, whose real name is Karenjit Kaur Vohra, spent her early years in Ontario. When she was 14, her parents moved the family to Michigan and then to Orange County, California. Not exactly a melting pot, Orange County was a less than ideal place for an adolescent Indian girl. “It was devastating at the time, but now I see it as gearing me up to the world I live in today, which is really isolated,” Leone tells me one afternoon in her trailer. “I was the outcast from the very beginning. I adapted my whole life on the idea that it was just me.”

After graduating high school, she worked in a bakery and at a Jiffy Lube before submitting a photo to an agent connected to the adult-film industry. With her sultry good looks, Leone was soon cast for a Penthouse shoot and then a B movie, pulling in more money in one week than she had made all year. Emboldened, she cold-called Vivid Entertainment, one of the world’s largest producers of pornography. She managed to negotiate a contract to make multiple movies (unusual), to receive a royalty on the sale of each DVD (also unusual), and, somehow, to make only girl-on-girl films (very unusual). In 2008, she founded her own production company, Sunlust, which produces adult films, but she no longer acts in them. “People always want me to have had a traumatic experience in the adult industry,” she says. “And I didn’t.”

When a producer from Bigg Boss contacted her, “I thought, There’s no way I’m going to a country where what I do is illegal,” Leone tells me over dinner at her hotel. “They are going to tar and feather me and hang me on a post.” Sure enough, controversy erupted before she even set foot in India. The night before Leone was to fly from Los Angeles to Mumbai, the show’s producers informed her that a bomb threat had been called in, and they instructed her not to get on the plane.

But if it was scandal the producers were looking for, it’s not exactly what they got. Instead, Leone played the good girl. She struggled to speak with her housemates in Hindi—a detail Indian fans often cite as having endeared her to them—and would wake up early to mop the floor. “They saw immediately that I wasn’t what they were expecting,” she says. “Not even a little bit. And all of a sudden they saw a different story.” Viewers repeatedly voted to keep her on the show. “It’s really weird because it’s almost like I was judging India, and India was judging me,” she says. “And people were surprised by how normal I was, and I was surprised by how open the culture was.”

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