A Different Mr. Right, Muslim And Funny
LOS ANGELES — Kumail Nanjiani loves ’90s romantic comedies, the mushier the better. “I started doing standup because of Hugh Grant’s best-man speech in ‘Four Weddings,’ which is basically a standup routine,” he said. For the aspiring comic, Mr. Grant was the gold standard of romcom stars, although Mr. Nanjiani never dreamed of becoming one himself. “It just felt like the people who were making those things were, like, aliens, or gods.”
Now Mr. Nanjiani is the lead in the romantic comedy “The Big Sick,” which goes into worldwide release in July. It is based on his own experiences meeting and dating his future wife, Emily V. Gordon, who wrote the script with him. Mr. Nanjiani, 39, plays a gently tweaked version of himself, a Pakistani-American standup comedian and Uber driver; Emily ( Zoe Kazan) is a therapist- to- be who heckles him — in a flirty, endearing way — during one of his sets. The relationship seems doomed from the start, since Mr. Nanjiani’s family expects him to marry a nice Pakistani woman, a fact he somehow neglects to mention to his new girlfriend. When Emily becomes ill and is placed in a medically induced coma — again, from real life — things reach a climax in an unexpectedly funny way.
Seeing a Pakistani- American comic secure the romantic lead in a Hollywood film would be a delight under any circumstances. But what makes “The Big Sick” all the more remarkable is what little fuss is made of it.
In the film, we see Kumail and his family eating and laughing and goofing off, fighting and making up, just like the actor’s real family. It’s a vision of a Muslim family, Mr. Nanjiani notes, rarely seen in American film.
“You just don’t see Muslims being matter- of-fact Muslim,” he said. “They’re always defined by their Muslim-ness. We’re either terrorists, or we’re fighting terrorists. I remember seeing ‘True Lies’ and going, why are we always the bad guys?”
Mr. Nanjiani has become known for his political views, taking to Twitter to criticize Mr. Trump’s abortive Muslim ban and making national news after a confrontation with Trump supporters. In the Trump era, a simple tale about a Muslim immigrant falling in love with a girl in a coma is anything but.
“When we started it, it was an important part of the movie, this experience of an immigrant in America,” said Judd Apatow, a producer of the movie. “What it’s turned into is an important representation that there are a billion people out there who are much closer to what we’re like than we are led to believe.”
The filmmakers better understood how the new political climate affected their movie when early audiences got to the scene in which a young white man heckles Mr. Nanjiani in the middle of a comedy set. “Go back to ISIS,” the man yells, smirking. Playing Mr. Nanjiani’s future mother- in- law, Holly Hunter is having none of it; near fisticuffs ensue.
Before the election, Mr. Nanjiani said, that scene “played very funny, but now it’s almost a cathartic mo- ment, like a howl of righteous rage.”
The film, directed by Michael Showalter and also starring Ray Romano and the Bollywood actor Anupam Kher, received rave reviews after its Sundance debut in January.
This part is far different from Mr. Nanjiani’s past jobs.
Until now, Mr. Nanjiani, who came to the United States from Pakistan when he was 18 to go to college in Iowa, has tackled ensemble roles on shows like “Silicon Valley” ( HBO) and “Adventure Time” (Cartoon Network).
“I never decided I wanted to be an actor,” he said. “I just started doing standup because I love standup. Everything else has sort of been these tiny steps leading to this.”
He is happy he has never had to play terrorists. “I know a lot of brown actors who play terrorists because they’re physically intimidating,” he said. “For me, it was like, ‘O.K., you’ll be the nerd.’ So I’ve played the nerd. I’ve played food- delivery guys. But I always tried to find something in the characters so that they weren’t just defined by what they looked like.”