Challenging stereotypes is actor’s superpower
Jagannathan continues to poke holes in depictions of South Asian women on TV
Nalini Vishwakumar is a strict, widowed Indian mother raising her teen daughter the only way she knows how: with an iron fist. A medical professional by day, she strives to make their San Fernando Valley home a fortress of tradition and discipline, enforcing lessons learned from her upbringing in India. She’s also pushing her academically gifted daughter toward an Ivy League education because, according to Nalini, being an average American kid is not enough: “Normal teenagers end up in prison, or worse, working at Jersey Mike’s.”
Actor Poorna Jagannathan plays Nalini opposite Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as the rebellious Devi in Netflix’s coming-of-age comedy “Never Have I Ever.”
If acting is Jagannathan’s calling, challenging stereotypes is her superpower. She has been poking holes in stock depictions of brown, Asian and immigrant women with smaller roles in TV’s most talkedabout series for the better part of a decade: “House of Cards,” “Better Call Saul,” “Big Little Lies,” “The Night Of,” “Ramy” and “Defending Jacob.” But with “Never Have I Ever,” now in its second season, Jagannathan moves from the margins, where so many women of color continue to be relegated, to the center of the story.
Jagannathan embodies much of what made Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s young-adult comedy about an Indian American high schooler a breakthrough series when it debuted last year, from its innate understanding and brilliant comedic manipulation of first/second generation culture clash to its nuanced portrayal of how grief, anger and fierce family love shape our lives. Nalini could have easily been a composite of stereotypes — an unyielding South Asian parent, a successful Indian doctor, a dutiful daughter-in-law. But in Jagannathan’s hands, she’s a refreshing representation of the realities behind cultural typecasting.
“The problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. Yes, Devi is an overachieving, nerdy Indian American girl, and Nalini is a Tiger Mom with zero capacity for finding middle ground,” said Jagannathan, 48. “But they are all so much more than that. And that’s what makes this character so fulfilling to play. You see Nalini’s desires, her vulnerability, her grief alongside her relentlessly strict parenting. You see her as a three-dimensional person — something that American TV rarely affords minorities.”
Born in Tunisia to Indian parents, Jagannathan moved around the world because of her father’s career track as an ambassador, with stints in Ireland, Pakistan, Argentina, India, the U.S. and Brazil. She speaks English with an elegant, impossible-to-pinpoint accent, and she’s also fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Hindi and Tamil. Her personal style is global bohemian: flowy pants, a silky tank top, flat sandals, wild curls framing her face.
Giving back is intrinsic to Jagannathan’s intentions as an actor and as a human who has experienced, and recovered from, trauma. “Nirbhaya: The Play,” a testimonial play inspired by the 2012 rape and murder of India’s Jyoti Singh and made in collaboration with
director and playwright Yael Farber, featured five women coming forward with their personal stories of sexual violence. Jagannathan, who was sexually assaulted at age 9, was one of those voices.
“The morning after the news of Jyoti Singh’s brutal rape broke ... I had the epiphany that my silence — the one that I thought protected me — actually made me complicit in the violence,” said Jagannathan. Coming forward with her story was terrifying, she said, especially since she’d never publicly spoken about her sexual assault before. But they performed “Nirbhaya” for three years, all over the world. After each show, throngs of people approached her and the rest of the cast, many breaking their silence for the first time.
“It was such a profound lesson in seeing art and
activism collide,” she said. “We were seeing how a system could be dismantled just by the power of truth and how shame could be shifted from the survivor to the perpetrator where it rightly belongs. I think great art follows Newton’s third principle; it has a sort of luminosity to it that is in opposition to the darkness it may have been born out of.”
“Never Have I Ever” may not seem like an obvious venue for reconciling with one’s past, but in Jagannathan’s eyes, it is. “It’s YA, but even adults are transported back into their high school years. I feel that with ‘Pen15’ too,” she said. “I don’t think you’re supposed to cry this much watching a comedy. But you can because now you’re an adult digesting and holding the grief or trauma or injustice that you couldn’t hold as a child.”
Jagannathan spent 15 years working in advertising before and during her attempts to break into acting. But by 2010 she was ready to give up on the dream of making a living onstage or in front of the camera. There were simply too few parts for women like her, and the one-dimensional roles that were available were ancillary at best.
Then, in 2011, she was offered a role in the Indian film “Delhi Belly,” and folks began to take notice of her quiet yet commanding screen presence. And as American television productions were beginning to diversify, things began to pick up for Jagannathan. Her breakthrough roles would include a heartbreaking performance as the bereaved immigrant mother whose son is wrongly accused in HBO’s haunting 2016 drama “The Night Of ” and her portrayal
of a passion-starved housewife in Hulu’s Muslim American comedy “Ramy.” But it was the central and multifaceted role of Nalini in “Never Have I Ever” that shattered something of a glass ceiling for Jagannathan and likely other women of color on the same path. Still, she knows better than to assume the revolution has arrived.
“As minorities, our screen time is increasing,” said Jagannathan. “We are featured more and fill more and more roles. (It’s) a huge win. But our ‘seen time’ remains low . ... Character arcs for minorities still feel underdeveloped and stereotypical. As a result, the audience doesn’t fully see us. They don’t get the three-dimensional version of us, and it’s that version that moves the needle. That’s the version that can create empathy, understanding and change.”