No spelling bee jokes, curry references or outsourcing comments. Hollywood is finally making space for Indian actors
Dileep Rao might just be living the Indian American actor’s dream in Hollywood today. First, there is his box office average. Rao is just three films old but two of them are James Cameron’s Avatar and Christopher Nolan’s Inception. The third, Drag Me to Hell by Sam Raimi, got the red carpet treatment at Cannes. That makes him box office gold.
But what’s most exciting for him is that the roles he plays weren’t even meant to be Indian. Take Yusuf, the pharmacologist mixing the dream potions in Inception. “He was written amorphously,” said Rao. “He could be anything — Arab, Muslim, Sri Lankan. I did my own biography for him when I was cast.” Likewise for Avatar, director Jim Cameron was not looking for an Indian. “The character was changed to Max Patel because I was Indian,” says Rao.
Indian actors in Hollywood have always faced the double whammy of colourblind casting (meaning Keanu Reeves gets to play Prince Siddhartha) or ethnic stereotyping (Amrish Puri and those monkey brains in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom). Actor Kal Penn, aka Kalpen Modi, says after that film came out, classmates didn’t want to sit next to him during lunch. “They were convinced I had monkey brains in my lunch box.”
Penn has since gone on to films like Superman Returns, The Namesake and, of course, the iconic Harold and Kumar films. But he’s also had to ham his way through films like National Lampoon’s Van Wilder. Penn said he almost hung up on his agent when he heard the character in Van Wilder was named Taj Mahal. An actor friend asked him how many things he found offensive in the script. He said there were probably about 30. She said, “You can’t pick all 30 because then it becomes a political issue. Pick 12 things that are so outrageous that you won’t be able to sleep at night if you say them. And then, come up with something funnier.” Penn did that. He also learned his lesson. “As an ethnic actor, you have to work a million times harder than anyone else just to get your foot in the door,” says Penn. “We have to be incredibly overqualified for even the smallest part.”
Flash forward to 2010. Change is in the air, at least on television. Where once the only Indian on television was Apu, the shopkeeper in The Simpsons (voiced by a non-Indian) now American audiences have seen Naveen Andrews in Lost, Parminder Nagra in E.R. and Archie Panjabi who just bagged an Emmy for her role as investigator Kalinda Sharma on the CBS series The Good Wife. There is an entire sit-com set in a call center —NBC’s Outsourced. It’s not all stellar. But the variety just means there’s room for the good, the bad, the ugly and no one character has to carry the torch for the entire desi community.
The big screen hasn’t quite kept up. Dileep Rao says after 9/11 he had his share of offers of terrorists and fundamentalists. “I didn’t want to do those and I didn’t want to do jerky accents,” he says. “Basically, I don’t want to embarrass my parents.” Kal Penn’s villainous turn in Superman Returns didn’t have the “jerky accent”. Actually, he barely spoke at all. (On the plus side, his villainy had nothing desi about it, no monkey brains or Kali references.)
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But the small screen can help push change on the big one. Critics noticed Aaasif Mandvi when he starred in Ismail Merchant’s Mystic Masseur. But it’s his stint as “the foreign-looking correspondent” on The Today Show with Jon Stewart that really upped his profile. “They had written a role for a Middle East correspondent,” says Mandvi. “I auditioned. It was supposed to be one-off. They kept calling me back.”
It’s helped get Mandvi’s pet project Today’s Special, a food and love comedy, starring him as a chef along with Naseeruddin Shah, get off the ground. It releases in October in the US. Mandvi is already pitching a sitcom about a dysfunctional self-help guru. “I want to create projects, not just wait around for the phone to ring,” he says. “That’s the most disempowering thing as an actor.”
Today’s Special with its finding-your-roots-through-curry theme is not about breaking stereotypes as much as it is about taking control of the script. But colourblind change is afoot. In Lisa Cholodenko’s lesbian drama The Kids Are All Right, Kunal Sharma might be lost amidst the star power of Annette Benning, Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo. He plays Jai, poised between being best friend and boyfriend for the couple’s daughter Joni. He is South Asian. But it is not an excuse to bring on Indian parents aghast at lesbian moms. There are no spelling bee jokes, no curry references, no outsourcing comments.
He is just Jai. In Hollywood, that’s real progress, enough to say ‘jai ho’.
[Sandip Roy hosts the radio show New America Now in San Francisco]
