T H E R E A L D E A L . . . M A K E N O M I S T A K E
by Moonah Ellison
I finally caught Aasif Mandvi on a zoom call. He’s in Manhattan somewhere in an office building. The man is hard to pin down these days. He’d been on a press junket all day to promote the fourth and final season of Evil on Paramount+ that will premiere in a few days from now.
With a career that spans over 35 years for the Peabody award-winning actor, writer, creator, comedian, author and producer Mandvi — whose resume includes The Daily Show with Jon Stewart; M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender, Million Dollar Arm opposite Jon Hamm; Mother’s Day with Kate Hudson, Jennifer Aniston, and Julia Roberts; The Internship with Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn; and The Dictator with Sacha Baron Cohen among others — he seems to just be getting started.
I ask Mandvi what and why. How did he end up in acting? What was the motivation? Can he even remember? A boy from the West Yorkshire city of Bradford in England then Tampa, Florida in the States at 16. How did it all begin for Mandvi? “I don’t even know what the motivation was. I’ve always thought entering into this business or becoming a performer or becoming an artist of any kind really, is more of a calling. There were no brown people on television, or anything that I watched outside of Bollywood, and Omar Sharif,” insists Mandvi. “And so it was certainly an unexpected, sort of unconventional thing to do. But I watched this movie called Bugsy Malone when I was a kid, and I saw all these young actors, one of them being Scott Baio and another Jodie Foster. I just thought, oh, that’s what I want to do. That seems like the greatest thing to do with your life. So I decided that I wanted to be an actor.”
At that time in the late 70s there was no internet, or anything for that matter. So Mandvi went down to the local library in Bradford and got the names of all of the children’s theatre groups in places like Huddersfield and Sheffield and literally hand wrote letters to all of them. Amazing, saying I want to be part of you. And the one company that got back to him was the Brighouse Children’s Theatre in Brighouse in the north of England. You can come down on Wednesday nights and we have classes for children your age. He performed, pantomimed, even wrote a short play at 11. His Indian parents were horrified that this was what their son was getting into, but at the same time his mother was very sup- portive. Mandvi credits his mother with driving him to take theater classes when they moved to Florida when he was 16. High school turned into a scholarship to the University of South Florida to study theater and then a move to Orlando to Disney World and eventually a move to New York City.
He had already been working for a long time in theater and doing parts on television and had been on Broadway at that time. He’d even done the Merchant Ivory film, The Mystic Masseur, by then. When he got to New York, Mandvi began to hook roots in New York theater, eventually developing his critically acclaimed one-man show Sakina’s Restaurant which made its premiere in 2018 at the American Place Theater and earned him an Obie Award. Mandvi revived this production at the Minetta Lane Theatre and received the 2019 United Solo Special Award, which honors outstanding solo performers. Mandvi also received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for the role of Amir Kapoor in Ayad Aktahr’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Disgraced, at Lincoln Center.
“… I mean when I got to New York, I felt like my insides matched my outsides New York feels like it has the energy and the rhythm of my insides. … ‘
But Mandvi’s most memorable break was with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. Mandvi never considered doing The Daily Show, it wasn’t something he ever thought he would do because he didn’t come from stand up. It was ultimately one of the biggest moves in his career.
“I suddenly entered into a world that made me go from an actor who people sort of recognized from a project or something to actually being someone, an actor where people knew my name,” said Mandvi. “It changed the entire trajectory of my career. But I didn’t actually want to even do it. I just found out that my ex-girlfriend had gotten engaged so I was very depressed. And I was writing a letter to her. I was having this moment of self reflection on my life, what I had done and what I had achieved and how I couldn’t maintain relationships and all this stuff. And then suddenly, I got this call, like, they want you to come and audition for The Daily Show. And I was like, yeah, not today, I think maybe tomorrow. And they were like, well, if you don’t go today, it’s done. I literally just threw on a suit and tie and went down to The Daily Show studios and there was Jon Stewart and I auditioned for him. And Jon hired me right on the spot, he just said, ‘You’re going to be on the show, and you’re gonna be on the show tonight.’ And so, it was one of those days, August 9, 2006, where my life changed in an instant. Occasionally I’ll have these moments where I woke up that morning, and I was one person, and I went to bed that night, and I was a Daily Show correspondent.”
Which takes us to the present day: Evil. The drama series follows three individuals hired by the Catholic Church to investigate supernatural events. Mandvi plays the group’s technical expert and equipment handler. Mandvi promises Season Four will be “gangbusters. It has got more bumps and twists and turns and things and monsters and comedy. I think Ben goes on an incredible journey this season of challenging his own certainty and his own empiricism. And he’s got a girl that’s haunting him the whole season.”
He was in London when he got the audition. It was a part that he hadn’t ever encountered before in terms of somebody thinking of him for that role. As a brown actor in Hollywood, you get to play a lot of doctors and tech heads and things like that. You never get to play a man who is intelligent — as Ben is on Evil — but also has sexuality and masculinity. “That is something that gets taken away from brown actors, especially brown men on television, and in movies, where you become desexualized. I think brown women sometimes are over-sexualized, brown men get desexualized in the realm of being sexual and masculine. And all of those things are left for white men. And so this was a role that was originally written for a white character.”
Mandvi then came to New York and met with Robert and Michelle King, the show’s creators. He got the part. Michelle King said to him one time: You can never go wrong hiring somebody who can do comedy, because if they can do comedy, they can do drama. “I didn’t get The Daily Show until I was 40 years old and I had lived a good deal of life by then and had a sense of myself as an actor and a performer and as a human being. I’m always evolving and constantly growing, but that sense of maturity I was able to bring to it was very different than if I had gotten The Daily Show when I was 20.”
Throughout all his roles to date, Mandvi sees the acceptance of brown men and women on screen and stage as something to continuously advocate for. In 2012’s Disgraced, written by Pakistani American playwright Ayad Akhtar who won the Pulitzer in 2013, Mandvi was the lead character. “It was one of the most fully fleshed-out, thoughtful, meditations on being an American Muslim after 9/11 in America. And dealing with that, and dealing with the complexity of that, and the self-hatred that goes around and goes along with being a brown man and an immigrant. So again, I got to work with him [Akhtar] and I got to experience another facet of my own creativity and artistry in that way.”
Mandvi reflects on how different the world is today than when he was coming up the acting ladder. He likes to joke that he came up “pre-Mindy Kaling and pre-Aziz Ansari” when there were no brown characters to play. Now there are stories that are being told now that are diverse and telling an American story, more than just about white people. But on the flip side, he notices that when the business is contracting, “like it is now, especially the television business, the first thing that gets dismissed are the voices of diversity and the voices of brown and black voices and the LGBT community.
“I think when Netflix came out, suddenly there was this realization, there’s a billion people in India that are game for content that tells their stories. And I think the space for creativity now is different for brown performers, actors and writers and creators than it was 10-15 years ago.”
For now, one of Mandvi’s biggest challenges to date is… being a dad. “That’s the hardest job. And the most important job I have right now is just trying to be a super dad to this four-year-old kid. I think any parent can attest to the fact that it is the most life-changing experience that you’ll ever have. I had it much later in life, I waited. And my wife waited. And we were both middle-aged by the time we had a child. So we’re older parents. But man, is that the most rewarding and frustrating experience? But in the best possible way.”
Mandvi has been in the United States for over 30 years. This is his home, Brooklyn to be exact. And that’s where he’s planning on staying. Mandvi always thinks of himself as a Turducken — a chicken inside a duck inside of turkey, as he puts it. Why the Americans would need such a thing? “I’m a little Indian baby inside an English school boy, instead of American adults. And that is really how I see myself and so America is my home, but I think that my experience of having grown up in the UK and having come from an Indian family gives me a perspective that is sometimes global. I’m not American in my thinking, my way of thinking about things is because I’ve lived overseas and I’ve lived in other places, and I have a culture that comes from a cultural background that is rooted somewhere else. So I think in that way, I am American and I’m not American, you know.
“I mean when I got to New York, I felt like my insides matched my outsides sort of thing. I was living in Tampa, Florida. I lived in Bradford, UK. But then I got to New York and I realized: New York feels like it has the energy and the rhythm of my insides. So it always felt really mild. It always felt like New York. You know, it sounds like a cliche, but it really is like, I am a New Yorker. I just found out until I moved to New York…But in New York, there’s something specific, which is what you mentioned earlier, which is it’s an intersection of so many different cultures, food, styles, people and that’s what makes it unique. There’s a lack of homogeneity here. Its diversity is its strength.”
So what’s up for Mandvi now? Evil is evil. And he will continue to drive. Whether it be writing, a few features he’s pushing to get made, he’ll be happy just to keep working. “I was a single guy, who was just obsessed with my career for many, many years. And now I’m a married man with a child. It anchors you, it anchors you and it teaches you more about who you are than anything else.
“I have a tremendous gratitude for the fact that I’ve gotten to work with tremendous people over the years, and I’ve gotten to work with some — I pinch myself sometimes — of the kind of creators and collaborators that I’ve gotten to work with. I’ve gotten to work with people who have really elevated my artistry and my creativity. And that has been the greatest thing that I can think of, the remarkable people that I’ve gotten to work with and gotten to learn from.”
photography by James Weber
stylist Megan Mattson
groomer Alex Byrne