Beyond a joke
COMEDIAN KUMAIL NANJIANI HAS TURNED TO THE DARK SIDE WITH HIS LATEST ROLE
Like so many immigrants before him, when actor and comedian Kumail Nanjiani moved to the US from his native Pakistan at the age of 18, he was chasing the American Dream.
On reflection, more than 25 years later, the Silicon Valley and Eternals star realises that it was the “version of the American dream that America tells itself and also tells the rest of the world”.
“That’s the version of the American dream I had in my head when I came here,” Nanjiani says, “the streets are paved with gold, anybody can be what they want to be, they can achieve anything if they put their mind to it.
“The reality is very different, right? Access to success is heavily dependent on your background, what you look like, what your name is, what your accent is, that kind of stuff. It’s very limiting. American success is easier for a very specific group of people and tough for everybody else.”
That exploration of the immigrant experience was one of the things that drew Nanjiani to his new project, Welcome To Chippendales, which also stars Aussie Murray Bartlett and streams on Disney+ next week.
The eight-part true crime series tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Somen “Steve” Banerjee, the Indian immigrant who made a fortune in 1980s Los Angeles as the founder of the all-male stripping troupe The Chippendales, until his empire collapsed under the weight of his greed and ambition, and a sordid series of events that included arson and murder.
“Steve is someone who has a very specific version of American success,” says Nanjiani. “When he gets here he finds there’s a lot of obstacles in his way and instead of being flexible and changing the definition of success in his head, he decides to take the obstacles head on and that’s what leads to the path of ruin.”
Unlike Banerjee, Nanjiani says he never considered changing his name when his post-college career as a comedian started to take off, first in Chicago, then in New York. Indeed, he still revels in the fact that “people are sort of confused by it and don’t know how to say it”, but does concede there were definitely more Hollywoodfriendly options.
“Lance Nanjiani?,” he ponders. “Or Chrismail? I’m changing my name to Chrismail. Chrises are very successful in Hollywood, maybe that’s what is holding me back? But yes, Steve changed his name and I think that’s very interesting because he understands that success in America is easier for a certain type of person so he changes his name in order to fit in.”
Nanjiani was initially approached to play the part in 2017, when he was basking in glory of his Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination for The Big Sick, which he wrote with his wife, Emily Gordon. At the time, creator Robert Siegel had intended it to be a movie, but after the success of his Pam & Tommy miniseries last year, reimagined it as a miniseries. Having never played a such a villainous character before, Nanjiani says he was initially “a little intimidated” to take on the part, particularly the further he got into the script and saw just how dark and desperate Banerjee’s actions became and how complex the role was.
“I was a little bit hesitant just because I didn’t know where to start figuring out how to play someone like this,” he says. “But once Rob told me the whole story, I was like, ‘This is too cool and interesting a project to not do and something as small as my fear over this is not a good enough reason to not do it’. So basically, at that moment, I said yes, knowing if I said yes, then I’m going to be forced to do it and I’ll be forced to figure out how to do it.” Trying to get inside the head of his character was quite the puzzle for Nanjiani, until he realised two things. Firstly, Banerjee was fuelled by selfloathing stemming from being “a fat, brown guy who’s a nerd surrounded by white, male Adonises”. And secondly, despite his wealth and power, Banerjee was basically an emotionally stunted child and the energy and single-mindedness that make him endearing at the beginning of the story are the same things that make him horrific by the end of it. “The childishness inside him, it’s also afraid of its own emotions, and kids have that, right?,” he says. “They’re only comfortable expressing a certain emotion. It’s hard for them to really feel their sadness and really feel their fear. I think a lot of men are like that and I think Steve was like that. He’s only comfortable expressing anger.”
Playing those dark scenes as the shoot went on took its toll as well, making it an exhausting and often difficult experience for an actor better known for comedy.
“When you’re sad in a scene, you’re not pretending to be sad, you are sad,” he says. “Your body doesn’t know the difference so you’re sad and then you’re angry, then you’re sad and you’re disappointed. So it’s all these sorts of heavy emotions over and over every day, snapping in and out of them, week after week. It was just really exhausting and at the end of it I took a nap for three weeks.”
For all his success in his adopted country, Nanjiani has kept in touch with his Pakistani roots in part through his ongoing obsession with cricket and he says he was glued to the recent T20 World Cup, in which the country of his birth blazed an unlikely trail to the final, only to fall short to England. He still has a WhatsApp group with his friends from high school to talk about a sport often met with confusion and scorn in the US.
“I find people are baffled by cricket and I feel that they’re proud of being baffled by cricket,” he says with a laugh. “I’m like ‘it’s not that complicated’ and you shouldn’t feel so proud of not understanding something that every child in Pakistan and India understands. When I watch the matches now, especially Pakistan matches, Emily, my wife, says, ‘You turn into a little kid’, and I really do. My knees are up on the couch, I’m eating cereal. It feels like my heart is connected directly to the TV and everything that happens is directly affecting my soul. It’s so exciting and fun, but also heartbreaking.”
I was a little bit hesitant just because I didn’t know where to start figuring out how to play someone like this
Welcome To Chippendales, Disney+, from November 22