For Priyanka, playing character of Sati in ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ felt special

Los Angeles, Dec 24: Actor Priyanka Chopra felt the weight of playing a character like Sati in “The Matrix Resurrections”. For her, there was something sacred about it.
Discussing the film with her co-stars during EW’s latest instalment of ‘Around the Table’, Chopra, 39, says she felt it when she put on the costume.
“It was really fun, at least in the physicality, even with the hair, to have references to young Sati,” Chopra says.
“Even the clothes, we treated her like a warrior but at the same time had an homage to her Indiana roots. We used colours which were Indian. We had borders of sarees. Little details which were so amazing and so well done by the team that as soon as I put it on there was something very sacred about who I became.
“And [director] Lana [Wachowski], that was something that she spoke to me about: the older version of Sati and where she comes into play with Neo and Trinity’s journey.”
Sati was a character first introduced in 2003’s “The Matrix Revolutions”, thought to be the epic finale to the blockbuster sci-fi franchise at the time. She was a program created out of love by two other programs, who smuggled the girl into the Matrix. The Oracle watched over her, believing she would have some great importance in the future.
Chopra’s Sati, now appearing older, arrives in “The Matrix Resurrections”, which picks up decades after the events of ‘Revolutions’.
Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) are somehow alive after perishing during the events of the machine-human war. Their minds are back in the Matrix, though they don’t have memories of their life together. A hacker named Bugs (Jessica Henwick), helped by a new version of Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), finds Neo and, once again, takes him down the rabbit hole.
Chopra did feel a burden that came with playing someone so important to the mythology of “The Matrix”, but there was also a freedom of playing Sati so far removed from the time and place in which audiences met her in the third movie.
“Coming on to a film that had the legacy that it did was very exciting. Playing the same character but the older adult version of her gave me a lot of freedom to be able to create something that was new and not have the burden of playing a character which was developed completely,” she told EW.
“I think there was a burden and responsibility of living up to the expectation of what and who she would be as an adult,” she adds, “but at the same time I didn’t have a responsibility of, ‘Am I going to be like her?’ So, it was a lot of creative interpretations that I had which was really fun and challenging to do.”
The Matrix Resurrections is currently playing in theaters and on HBO Max.
Sati is one of the most enigmatic characters in “The Matrix Resurrections”. After catching our attention in the original trailer where she leafs through a copy of ‘Alice in Wonderland’, Chopra’s character only gets two short-but-essential sequences in the movie itself.
The first time she shows up is in the Matrix itself, where she plays a stranger casually coaxing Neo into discovering the truth about his simulated life. Later, she reveals herself to be a friend of Niobe and a key ally to humankind.
The character Sati appears for the first time in the first minutes of “The Matrix Reloaded” at the Limbo station scene, a place for programs who serve no purpose in the Matrix. She’s an “exile” program, born from the union of two other programs, Rama-Kandra and Kamala. Sati was created by her parents without a specific purpose. The Architect considers programs like Sati to be a blight on his perfect Matrix, but the Merovingian is willing to help save her from deletion. In this scene, she briefly meets Neo, and they bond, writes inverse.com.
In “The Matrix Revolutions”, we see that Sati has been taken in by the Oracle and her protector Seraph. However, Agent Smith infects Sati with his virus programming and later possesses The Oracle, too. Then, at the end of Revolutions, it’s revealed that the Oracle planned for that to happen. The Oracle sits on a bench with Sati as they look out over a new dawn for the Matrix and wonder if Neo will ever return.
In “The Matrix Resurrections”, we meet a new and improved Sati. This Sati, we learn, lost her father at the hands of the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) when he purged the Matrix of useless programs. She guides Neo into this deadlier and new version of the Matrix. She even seems to have a level of presence reminiscent of the Oracle.