‘I was icked out’ by thought of random actor ‘licking my face’

In the new romantic comedy Love Again, children’s book author Mira Ray (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) learns how to, well, love again when she falls for an entertainment journalist (Sam Heughan) who has her late fiancé’s phone number.

But first she tries her hand at online dating, meeting a match for dinner at a restaurant. As the camera pans up from the ground up, the mystery man is revealed to be someone audiences will immediately recognize: Nick Jonas, Chopra Jonas’s real-life husband.

In a bit of wink-wink rom-com hilarity, the two turn out to be woefully incompatible. Jonas’s Joel is a self-obsessed meathead dude-bro who still puts the moves on Mira (and licks her face in the back of a New York City taxi) despite the lack of any discernible chemistry between them.

In a new interview with Yahoo Entertainment, Chopra Jonas explained how she and writer-director Jim Strouse lured her husband into shooting a cameo while filming in London in 2020.

“We were filming during COVID, so we had to cast a random actor to come in and do this scene, and that person would’ve had to quarantine for 14 days to be able to shoot the scene with me,” Chopra Jonas (Quantico, Citadel) told us.

“And I was also a little icked out about the licking of my face by just some person. And Jim was like, ‘Well, your husband is here.’ [Nick] had come to London to help me settle in. And [Jim] was like, ‘What if we ask him?’ And I was like… ‘Great idea.’ I went home and Nick was just so sweet about it. He really took one for the team.

In fact, the actress says her Jonas Brother pop-star husband might have enjoyed the assignment a little too much.

“He was really leaning into like practicing the [character’s] douchebag nature … like glancing at his biceps and stuff,” she laughs. “It’s like the opposite of who he is. So it was really fun. … He loved it.”

Love Again is now playing.

Watch the trailer: