Rahul Kohli
British actor Rahul Kohli has a knack for picking out-of-thebox genre roles and then stealing scenes in all of them. He starred as the lovable Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti on The CW’S “izombie” for five seasons before moving onto projects including HBO Max’s animated “Harley Quinn” and Mike Flanagan’s “The Haunting of Bly Manor” for Netflix. Now Kohli has teamed up with that creator-director again, on “Midnight Mass,” also for Netflix. In it, Kohli plays Sheriff Hassan, a single father in charge of keeping law and order in a small, isolated community where the inhabitants are getting taken in by the charm and seeming miracles of a priest.
• How did Mike come to you with this new role? Mike directed the pilot of “Bly Manor,” which was my first time working with Intrepid [Pictures] and Mike and Co. Mike sized me up and then, over the course of the next month or six weeks, I’d get random emails from Mike: “On a scale of one to , what’s your American accent?”; “How old do you think you can play?” Eventually I think I said something like, “Yo, let’s stop flirting; let’s have a meeting.”
• What made you want to sign on? He walked me through basically every beat [of “Midnight Mass”] in about minutes and I was just hooked. He said he’d like to offer me the role of the sheriff, and I said yes on the spot, and I remember Mike was like, “No, you have to go to your team.” And I was like, “I don’t give a shit, this is my role. Don’t you dare offer it to anyone else!”
• Playing an officer of the law can be a divisive thing at this moment in history. Did this add pressure to the role? A week or two after my ride-along [with the LAPD], George Floyd was murdered, and it was very difficult to want to put that uniform on, so I wrestled with it for a while. But the truth of it is, no one’s denying that there are good apples and bad apples. I just tried to convey a sense of dignity. The biggest sell of this character, for me, was Mike’s ability to take America’s most iconic TV and action hero — the American sheriff — and then America’s greatest threat — the brown, bearded man — and smash those two together. It was less about the sheriff side and more about the goodness to him that was more important to us; he just happened to be in a position of authority.
• Your character is Muslim. What were the responsibilities you felt in being a representative of that faith in a show more heavily steeped in Christian themes? My best friend in the whole world, Mohamed Bouissa, [is] the person that I thought about all the time when studying for Hassan, to the point where we were having long conversations about Islam. When Mike found that out, Mohamed was brought on to consult. I wanted to know, from Mohamed, “Bruv, when you were or or , what did you want to see from a Muslim hero in a show?” That was my M.O. I just wanted to give young brown kids, and particularly Muslim kids, something to watch that they’d feel proud watching.
“I was like, ‘I don’t give a shit, this is my role. Don’t you dare oer it to anyone else!.’”