[3] A few months after sitting her A-levels and leaving school, Nagra was approached by Jez Simons, her former drama instructor, about becoming part of the Leicester-based theatre company Haithizi Productions, for which he served as the artistic director.

[3] Nagra's first London theatrical job came in 1994, when she was cast as the Princess in the pantomime Sleeping Beauty at the Theatre Royal Stratford East.

In 1996, Nagra took a small part in Chikamatsu Monzaemon's Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards that was performed at Cottesloe, Royal National Theatre.

Despite lacking formal theatrical training, Nagra signed with Joan Brown, a veteran London-based agent,[5] after which she was cast in minor television roles in the British medical drama series Casualty, and in the made-for-television film King Girl, in which she played an abusive member of an all-girl gang.

An intensive ten-week training course in the game Futebol de Salao, coached by Simon Clifford, put Nagra through rigorous nine-hour-a-day workouts.

Although Second Generation was a ratings flop, it was a critical success, earning a place in The Observer newspaper's top 10 British TV programmes of 2003.

[9] While on a promotional junket in Los Angeles for Bend It Like Beckham, Nagra was informed by her agent that John Wells, one of the producers of the NBC medical drama series ER, was interested in meeting her.

[5] Bend It Like Beckham writer and director Gurinder Chadha revealed during a 2007 episode of BBC's Movie Connections that she arranged the meeting, because she had recommended Nagra for the role of the new Indian character in ER during a conversation with her friend Wells.

[citation needed] Not long after the meeting, Nagra signed a one-year contract that included an option for three additional years.

Noah Wyle, announcing his departure from the series in 2004, described Nagra as "the future" of ER,[10] and the media concurred, anointing her as one of the show's "golden girls".

When Nagra finished filming the eleventh season of ER in 2005, she returned to her native Leicester to star in Love in Little India directed by Amit Gupta.

[2] She then starred as Dr Lucy Banerjee in the Fox science fiction drama series Alcatraz which ran for one season from 16 January to 26 March 2012.

In 2018, Nagra joined the second season of the Netflix web television series 13 Reasons Why as Priya Singh, the new counsellor of Liberty High.

[17] In 1996, while on the set of the play Fair Ladies at a Game of Poem Cards, Nagra met Irish actor Kieran Creggan, with whom she later moved into a flat in Kennington, south London.

[22] The National Portrait Gallery in London holds a pencil drawing of Nagra by Stuart Pearson Wright created in 2004.