Pakistani-American actor makes Hollywood rom-com debut
NEW YORK: Growing up in Pakistan’s chaotic megacity of Karachi, Kumail Nanjiani never imagined he would one day star in a Hollywood rom- com, let alone be a leading man in Donald Trump’s America.
“The Big Sick,” opening in selected cinemas on June 23, brings to the big screen the reallife story of how the 39-year- old comedian met and fell in love with his American wife, Emily Gordon.
It narrates their courtship, Nanjiani’s strict Muslim parents trying to set him up with an arranged marriage and Emily falling gravely ill, forcing him to take charge and build a relationship with her parents.
Nanjiani and Gordon co-wrote the script and filmed the movie long before Trump’s election, but the president’s attempts to ban visa-holders from certain Muslim countries, has given the film renewed potency.
Its challenge of stereotypes in US popular culture, portraying Muslims as regular people rather than terror suspects or fighters, has taken on even greater significance than initially intended.
“Obviously it would be great if our movie came out and people didn’t see it as a political statement because it really isn’t. It is just a love story and a comedy,” Nanjiani was quoted as saying by Variety at the Los Angeles premiere.
The movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, ironically on the day of Trump’s inauguration, and Amazon acquired the distribution rights for a reported $ 12 million, allegedly one of the biggest deals in Sundance history.
Nanjiani, who plays a tweaked version of himself, stars opposite Zoe Kazan as Emily, and Ray Romano and Holly Hunter as her parents.
The son of strict Muslim parents from Pakistan’s teeming business capital on the Arabian Sea, Nanjiani moved to the United States to study at Grinnell, a liberal arts college in Iowa in 1997.
He got into comedy at university, and after graduation moved to Chicago, where he worked in computer science by day and performed stand-up gigs at night.
He likes to say that he was inspired to get into comedy by British actor Hugh Grant’s bestman speech in 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
But if Grant personifies a certain type of stuttering Englishman, Nanjiani has joined a stable of US comedians treading ground more commonly associated with public intellectuals than gags for laughs.
At a stand-up performance in New York to promote the movie, he joked about the difficulty of getting US citizenship, getting racist abuse on Twitter and being able to vote in last year’s election — “It really made a huge difference!”
“People are like ‘go back to India!’. I’ve never been to India,” he deadpanned, claiming he fantasised about being able to rescue a racist from danger to “see the awkward look on their face.” Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington and now fellow at the Hudson Institute think tank, sees Nanjiani’s success as “proof that individuals of all communities and countries can do well when they have the opportunity.”
“Pakistan spends more on weapons than on education, has one of the highest out of school population of school- going age children in the world and allows jihadis to flourish rather than encouraging talented people like Kumail,” he observed. — AFP