Amara Khan is the star of HBO’s new hit legal drama. Here, she tells why she swapped banking for box-sets
broken through in Wes Anderson’s 2007 quirkfest The Darjeeling Limited and impressed in recent high-concept detective drama Stan Lee’s Lucky Man, K a r a n’s role in one of t h e mo s t deliriously absorbing TV shows of the year is about to land on British screens. The Night Of — a l o n g- b re w i n g blockbuster re make o f t h e BBC’s Criminal Justice, originally spearheaded by the late James Gandolfini and made by HBO — has alre ady c aptivated America (it concludes there on Sunday).
But from next week, Sky Atlantic viewers will get a taste of its fastidiously detailed mix of Serial-st yle murder mystery, Oz-like prison grit and Good Wife-ish courtroom drama.
In short , i t ’s tot al c atnip for the streaming classes (Sky will even be making all eight episodes available inst antly, Netflix- st yle). And while Wembley boy Riz Ahmed is rightly getting plenty of attention in the lead role as Nasir Khan, a PakistaniAmerican college kid who suddenly finds himself accused of a murder he has no memory of committing, Karan’s turn as inexperienced Indian-American defence attorney Chandra Kapoor slowly emerges as one of the show’s most potent and unexpected pleasures.
“It’s such a joyful surprise,” says Karan of Chandra’s journey from peripheral l e gal novice ( c ynic al ly deployed in epi sode three by her hotshot boss to help snare a client with vaguely s i mil a r a n c e s t r y ) t o wi l y operator, which is very much central to the plot.
Eve r- g r i n n i n g , inqui sitive and understatedly cool in a black YMC dress and patent -eather loafers, Karan is effervescent company. Even allowing for the effects of that martini, she’s still evidently in the afterglow of a once-ina-lifetime job that not only enabled a reunion with her old Oxford classmate Ahmed (“He’s still got the same spark, philosophy and economics, she parked her performing ambitions and began a career in the City as an investment banker. She worked for a year at boutique f i r m Hawkpo i n t a n d C I B C Worl d Markets, once boasting, Apprentice contestant-style, that she wanted to be the “b i g ge s t , b a d d e s t b a n ke r in London”. How does she look back on her days as a financier now? “Learning is never wasted,” she says. “I really went into the City to try to make a career out of it because I just thought it was impossible to make one out of acting. I thought it was absurd for me to even try.” She allows that there were Wolf of Wall Street-worthy moments of excess (“It’s fun, why not? When something good happens that you’ve worked hard for, you want to pop a cork and celebrate”) but to the pronounced disappointment of her “devastated” family, the pull of acting proved too strong. “I couldn’t find the joy of banking,” she admits. However, Karan admits that, even though her “mental arithmetic is shot to shit”, she misses flexing