In 2009, on the âLate Show with David Letterman,â the comedian Kumail Nanjiani walked onstage, wearing a boxy black suit and a cordless mike, to do a standup set. The band played a few bars of âBorn in the U.S.A.,â an allusion, presumably, to the fact that he wasnât. The first anecdote of Nanjianiâs set fell flat. He stood stiffly, swallowing hard, his hands clasped tightly in front of his chest. Then he told a joke about theme-park attractions with excessively convoluted backstories. âItâs like a story line to a porn movie,â he said. âI really donât care what all your professions are. Iâm just here for the ride.â It wasnât the cleverest punch line in Nanjianiâs act, but it received a big laugh and a ten-second applause break. He exhaled audibly, relaxing his hands. His next bit was about the Cyclone, the rickety roller coaster on Coney Island. âThe Cyclone was made in the year 1927! Let that sink in. They should change the name of that ride to 1927, âcause that fact is way scarier than any cyclone,â he said. âAnd the whole thing is made of wood . . . you know, that indestructible substance that NASA uses for its space shuttles.â The bit could have been delivered in the nineteen-sixties, by Woody Allen or Mort Sahl, with one exception: Nanjiani said the ride was âthe scariest experience of my lifeâand I grew up in Pakistan.â
Nanjiani spent his childhood in Karachi, Pakistanâs biggest city. In 1997, when he was nineteen, he left to attend Grinnell College, a small liberal-arts school in the middle of Iowa. âI thought, from watching TV and stuff, that America was one place,â he told me. âThey only show you L.A. and New York. They donât warn you about Iowa.â When he got to college, he says, âI was super shy, but I learned that my friends thought I was funny.â His senior year, there was an open mike on campus, and his friends urged him to try standup. He performed for thirty-five minutes. âI donât think Iâve ever done better than that crowd, reaction-wise,â he said. âOf course, it was full of people who knew me. But it gave me an irrational amount of confidence.â After school, he moved to Chicago and started performing. Michael Showalter, a comedian and director who has admired Nanjiani from the beginning, told me, âAnyone who saw him saw how smart and fresh his voice was. The question wasnât whether heâd be successful, only which direction heâd choose to go in.â
The year of the Letterman set, Nanjiani landed a recurring role on âThe Colbert Report,â as a Guantánamo detainee who lives under Stephen Colbertâs desk. Many of Nanjianiâs earliest film and TV credits were, he says, âmore or less what youâd expectâ: âDelivery Guy,â âCable Guy,â âPakistani Chef.â But he quickly started getting more substantial roles, and in the past few years he has appeared on almost every show beloved by comedy snobs, including âPortlandia,â âBroad City,â âCommunity,â âKey & Peele,â and âInside Amy Schumer.â He now has a lead part on âSilicon Valley,â an ensemble comedy on HBO, playing a coder who, despite his good looks, remains hopelessly unlucky with women. âItâs a version of me in high school, when I was at my least confident,â he said.
As a child, Nanjiani spoke Urdu at home; he learned English at school, and picked up colloquialisms from TV. âI grew up watching âGhostbustersâ and âKnight Riderâ and Hot Wheels commercials,â he said. âWhen I got to college, having never set foot in America, I knew more American pop-culture references than my friends did.â As a standup, he said, âI was so eager to avoid being known as an immigrant comedian, or as a Muslim comedian, that I would just come out wearing a T-shirt and start talking about video games. I wasnât judgmental about other comedians using their backgrounds to their advantageâjoining the Spicy Masala Comedy Tour, or whateverâbut I could never bring myself to do it, even though I could have used the work.â
Then came 9/11. âSuddenly, Islam was the elephant in the room,â he continued. âI just thought, O.K., Iâm brown, I speak with an accentâI have to at least bring it up.â He began opening his sets by saying, âDonât worry, Iâm one of the good ones,â which put some audiences at ease. Other times, he was interrupted by someone shouting âGo home!â or âGo back to the Taliban!â Recalling one heckler, at a club in Milwaukee, Nanjiani said, âThe room got so quiet and awkward. I fumbled around with words and tried to ignore it. It made the audience pity me, which is not a good look for comedy. After that, I came up with something to sayâI realized it doesnât have to be a perfect line, just something to show the audience that youâre still in control.â The next time he was heckled, he responded, âThat guyâs right. I am a terrorist. I just do standup comedy on the side, to keep a low profile.â
A similar exchange, with âTalibanâ updated to âISIS,â appears in Nanjianiâs movie âThe Big Sick.â It premièred earlier this year, at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was a favorite among both audiences and critics. The movie was directed by Showalter, whose film career has included slapstick cult classics (âWet Hot American Summerâ) as well as offbeat romantic comedies (âHello, My Name Is Dorisâ), and produced by Judd Apatow, who has specialized, recently, in helping almost famous comedians adapt their formative experiences into memoiristic meta-comedies. Apatowâs producing partner, Barry Mendel, described âThe Big Sickâ to me as âpart comedy about comedy, part drama about families, part medical mystery, and also, incidentally, a Muslim American rom-com.â
Nanjiani co-wrote the screenplay with his wife, Emily V. Gordon, and he plays its protagonist, a standup comic named Kumail. Itâs the first feature either of them has written, and itâs Nanjianiâs first starring role. The fictional Kumail works as an Uber driver, a day job that didnât exist when the real Kumail still had day jobs. Aside from that, and a few other departures to help a joke land or a plotline cohere, the movie doesnât stray too far from a dramatically rich series of events that befell Gordon and Nanjiani a decade ago, shortly before they turned thirty.
Nanjiani didnât conceive of the film as at all political. âIt was just supposed to be a heartwarming little movie that, if we did it right, would be funny and maybe a bit poignant,â he said. But it was filmed last summer, when much of the conversation between takes was, inevitably, about the Presidential campaign; the Sundance première was on January 20th, the day Donald Trump was sworn in. âThat coincidence is so weird and terrible that I donât even know what to make of it,â Nanjiani told me. (On Twitter, where he has more than a million followers, he makes no secret of his political opinions: âIâm thankful our new President-elect is anti-Muslim so now my parents & I agree on politicsâ; âSilver lining: one day the ocean will take us.â)
Apatow said, âWe never talked about it in terms of âWhat does it mean to represent a secular Muslim onscreen?â We talked about telling Kumailâs story, and that led us, naturally, to questions about family and culture and religion.â The movie, which will be released in June, appears at a time when an individual action can seem unusually freighted with political meaningâwhen a football player taking a knee during the national anthem or a passenger being dragged from a plane can be transformed, by TV pundits and tweeting politicians, into a national Rorschach test. âI still donât look at it as a political movie, but I guess now everything is political, whether we like it or not,â Nanjiani told me. âLike that heckling scene, for instance. When we wrote it, the clear assumption was: That guy in the crowd is an asshole, an outlier, and the viewer of the movie is automatically on my side. Now that assholes like that guy have taken over the country, Iâm not sure how funny it plays.â
Early in his career, Nanjiani built his act around subjects he thought his American audiences would find relatable. While Louis C.K. and other comedians had success with an expansive, confessional style, he stuck to terse observational jokes about vintage horror movies, the nature of memory, and the pluralization of the word âoctopus.â An introvert, he was scared of performing, and he incorporated his fear into a pensive onstage persona. âHe would wear loose hoodies, and he was sort of a mumbler,â Pete Holmes, a comedian who started at the same time as Nanjiani and became one of his closest friends, told me. âHe was really good, but wordy, subtleâyou had to pay attention.â
What Nanjiani avoided mentioning onstage was that he was brought up a strict Shiite Muslim. He was taught that a lustful glance or a sip of wine would result in perpetual torment, and that the Quran was the literal and inerrant word of God; because the Quran didnât mention dinosaurs, dinosaurs had never existed. When Nanjiani was eight, his mother set aside a cache of jewelry that she planned to give his future wife on their wedding day. It went without saying that Nanjianiâs parents would select this future wife, and that she would be a Pakistani Shiite, possibly a family friend or a cousin. When Nanjiani left for college, his mother made him promise that he would never succumb to Western secularism. A few days later, during Grinnellâs freshman-orientation week, he shook a womanâs hand for the first time.
How could he make this upbringing funny to the tipsy patrons of Joeâs Bar on Weed Street? There would be too many terms to define, too much cultural context to establish in a ten-minute set. Besides, a successful joke requires a clear point of view, and his views were ambivalent and constantly shifting. He associated Karachi with poetry and architecture, violence and misogyny, delicious food, unnerving squalor, and every relative heâd ever loved. Part of him assumed that he would soon move back to Pakistan, and part of him knew that he never would. He couldnât fully articulate these thoughts to himself, much less to strangers.
By 2006, Nanjiani had been doing standup for five years. He lived with a friend on the North Side of Chicago and worked a day job as an I.T. specialist. âA really cliché job for a South Asian guy to have, I realize,â he said. âOn the other hand, I take some pride in how bad I was at it.â He performed three or four nights a week, around town and on the road. Many comedians, at this point, might have moved to New York or Los Angeles, where they could audition for TV jobs and get noticed by agents. Nanjiani, out of comfort and inertia, stayed in Chicago.
With time, he grew more assured onstage. He trained himself to take the microphone out of the stand and move aroundââIt sounds like a tiny thing, but it was transformative,â he saidâand he changed his hair style from a floppy middle part, Ã la nineteen-nineties Hugh Grant, to an Elvis pompadour. âHe started getting muscly and wearing tight T-shirts,â Holmes said. âHe plucked his unibrow. He started getting loud, controlling the room, high energy. It was like watching a car suddenly shift into a higher gear. Instead of calling him Kumail, I started calling him Newmail.â
At one show, in a bar on the North Side, Nanjiani asked, facetiously, âIs Karachi in the house?â Someone in the audience, also facetiously, let out a âWhoo!â Nanjiani could see that she was a white woman, a pretty brunette with a streak of purple in her hair. âI donât think so,â he said. âI would have noticed you.â Two nights later, they ran into each other again, and she introduced herself as Emily Gordon. She was from North Carolina, and although she was a couples and family therapist, she knew as much about comedyâand video games, and comic books, and horror moviesâas he did.
Soon they were texting almost every day. There was an obvious mutual attraction, but neither was interested in a relationship: Gordon, who was twenty-seven, had already been married and divorced; Nanjiani, then twenty-eight, wasnât supposed to be dating anyone, much less a non-Muslim. âWeâd hang out, hook up, and then be, like, âWe canât do this anymore. But letâs hang out again,â â Nanjiani said. âOnce, before she came over to watch a movie, I threw a bunch of dirty laundry on my bed, to insure that nothing would happen. It didnât work.â
Meanwhile, Nanjianiâs parents, who had moved from Karachi to New Jersey, were sending him information about eligible Shiite bachelorettes in the Chicago area. He avoided meeting the women. âMy American friends would be, like, âDude, just tell your parents youâre not interested,â â he said. âBut thatâs a misunderstanding of the culture. Arranged marriage is marriage. Anything else is unthinkable.â He felt American enough to want to choose his romantic partners, but Pakistani enough that he dreaded flouting his familyâs expectations. âI couldnât imagine a universe where I ended up accepting an arranged marriage, but I also couldnât imagine telling my parents that,â he said. âSo I just deflected and delayed.â
One day, after Nanjiani and Gordon had been dating for a few months, she texted him to say that she was going to the doctor. Nanjiani didnât hear from her for several hours. Around midnight, he got a call: Gordon was in the emergency room, and she was having trouble breathing. He rushed to the hospital and spent the night. By the next morning, Gordon was heavily sedated and was drifting in and out of wakefulness. Her lung was infected, and the infection was spreading fast. In order to treat it, the doctors told Nanjiani, they needed to put her into a medically induced coma. They asked if he was her husband. He said noâhe wasnât even sure that he was her boyfriend. They asked again, pressing him to sign a release form. Finally, at the doctorsâ insistence, he signed it. The doctors tied Gordon down and injected her with an anesthetic. She thrashed against the restraints, then fell into a coma.
Nanjiani was supposed to go on the road to open for Zach Galifianakis, but he stayed in Chicago and visited Gordon in the I.C.U. every day. She remained in the coma for more than a week while the doctors ruled out several possibilities, including H.I.V. and leukemia. Even a decade later, after having recounted the experience dozens of times, Nanjiani still chokes up whenever he talks about it. âI was sitting by her bed,â he said. âShe was unconscious, and she was hooked up to all these beeping machines, and I very clearly remember thinking, If she makes it out of this, Iâm gonna marry her.â His voice caught. âI know that sounds cliché, and itâs actually kind of creepy and nonconsensual if you think about it too hard. But that was the thought I had.â
âSpoiler alertâI made it,â Gordon said, last May, flashing me a thumbs-up and a goofy smile. On the eighth day of her coma, she received a diagnosis of adult-onset Stillâs disease, a rare inflammatory syndrome that is manageable once itâs identified and treated. âI have to sleep the right amount and exercise the right amount, and I still occasionally get flare-ups and have to stay in bed for a few days,â she told me. âBut no more I.C.U.s, which is pretty fucking sweet. Now I only have to go to the hospital when weâre filming a movie in one.â
As a co-writer of âThe Big Sick,â Gordon was on set every day of the shoot, which took place in New York, last spring. She and Nanjiani now own a house in Los Angeles, but during the shoot they rented an Airbnb in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The first time I met Gordon, she was sitting in a canvas directorâs chair in front of a video monitor, a pair of headphones slung around her neck. Next to her were Mendel, the producer, and Showalter, the director. We were in an art space in Williamsburg that had been decorated to look like the fictional Kumailâs bachelor apartment in Chicago: an Xbox, an inflatable mattress, a family-sized box of Cheerios. Between shots, Zoe Kazan, who played the fictional Emily, sat next to the real Emily, and they chatted about which books they were reading. At one point, Kazan turned to me and said, âYou know the first grader who has this cool third-grade cousin, and she just thinks her big cousin hung the moon? Thatâs how I feel about her, essentially.â
Kazan swung her feet in the air and squinted at shoes the costume designer had selected, a pair of gray ballet flats. âAre these shoes you would actually wear?â she asked Gordon.
Without speaking, Gordon gestured toward her own feet: gray ballet flats.
âFair enough,â Kazan said.
When the crew was ready, Showalter called for quiet, and those of us sitting in front of the monitors put on headphones. Kazan went into an adjacent room, and she and Nanjiani started filming the next scene: the coupleâs first fight. At this point in the movie, their relationship seems promising, but Kumail has been avoiding some traditional landmarks of commitment, such as introducing Emily to his parents. In the scene, Emily, rummaging in Kumailâs bedroom, finds a cigar box full of photosâthe Pakistani bachelorettes his mother has been attempting to set him up with. Emily starts to ask questions, including, âCan you imagine a world in which we end up together?â The emotional climax of the scene is Kumailâs inadequate response.
âFinding a literal box of photosâthatâs cinematic license,â Gordon told me. âThat said, the themes are obviously drawn from reality. And itâs extremely accurate to our actual conflict styles, to the point where itâs almost eerie to watch. His body responds to conflict by basically shutting down and going to sleep. Which, of course, makes me fly into a fucking rage.â When I took off my headphones, Kazanâs voice pierced through the walls, whereas Nanjianiâs was, for much of the scene, an inaudible murmur; in the video monitor, Kazan paced and gesticulated while Nanjiani leaned wearily against a doorpost, his eyes Stygian pools. In Nanjianiâs comic performances, on âSilicon Valleyâ and elsewhere, he has demonstrated onscreen magnetism and authenticity. Here, he showed that he could anchor a tense scene, full of long pauses and light on comic relief.
They filmed the argument several more times, improvising variations on the written dialogue. (Kazan: âAre you judging âPakistanâs Next Top Modelâ or something?â Nanjiani: âYou know thatâs not an actual franchise.â) Before each take, Showalter urged Nanjiani to speak more directly, sounding out the line between candor and cruelty. At the end of one take, Nanjiani said, in a near-whisper, âWeâve only been dating for five months, Emily. I think youâre overreacting.â
âHarsh,â Mendel, at the video monitors, said.
âFuck you, Kumail,â Gordon said. âCharacter Kumail, I mean.â
Because shooting had begun in the late morning and would end around midnight, they broke for âlunchâ at 5 P.M. Nanjiani, Gordon, and Kazan decided to walk to a vegan Asian-fusion restaurant nearby. On the way, they passed a trailer where the props department was preparing for an upcoming dinner scene; they had ordered from a Pakistani kebab house in Queens, and were deciding which foods would look best on camera. Kumail tasted the biryani and the haleem, a thick wheat stew. âThis is the real deal,â he said. âYou guys might also want to get some barfi. Itâs a milk-and-sugar thing, a dessert.â
âBarfi?â a production designer asked, writing down the word.
â âBarf,â with an âi,â â Nanjiani said.
They continued walking to the restaurant. âThe prop guys have been great on this,â Kazan said. âEven the books in my apartment are on point.â
Nanjiani nodded. âOn other stuff Iâve done, there were always monkeys and elephants and Buddhas and Arabic scriptâjust every possible brown-person thing.â
The next scene on the shooting schedule was one that took place earlier in the movieâa makeout scene. After lunch, Kazan and Nanjiani, preparing to simulate a Chicago winter, put on bulky sweaters, which would come off in the course of the action. âI think your stubble looks awesome, but you are going to scratch the shit out of my face,â Kazan said.
In a discussion the previous night, Kumail and the two Emilys had decided that, during the filming of this scene, Gordon would leave the set. âZoe doesnât think itâs weird if Iâm here, and I donât think itâs weird if Iâm here, but Kumail does,â Gordon said.
âIâm sorry,â Nanjiani said.
âDude, whatever makes it easier for you is fine with me,â Gordon said, gathering her things. âNow I get to go home, nap, maybe play some video games. I wish my husband would make out with other women every day!â
When Gordon was in the coma in Chicago, Nanjiani spent the first few days evading his parentsâ calls. One night, he picked up the phone and admitted that he had a girlfriend, that she was an American and a non-Muslim, and that she was very ill. âI was too exhausted to keep lying,â he said. He assumed that his mother would be furious, âbut she kept it together. Every day, sheâd go, âIs Emily O.K.?â Then, one day, the answer was yes, and she immediately switched to âHow could you do this to us?â â
Gordon left the hospital in May of 2007. She and Nanjiani were married that July, at Chicagoâs City Hall, with six friends as witnesses. Two weeks later, his parents hosted a Muslim wedding in New Jersey. The cleric, in a reverse-xenophobic gesture, refused to perform the ceremony for anyone with a non-Muslim name, so Gordon went by Iman for the day. âI think that the ceremony was my momâs way of saying to Emily, Even though youâre not the bride I imagined, Iâm trying my best to include you in the family,â Nanjiani said. Shabana, Nanjianiâs mother, told me that when she first learned about Emily, âI was a bit disappointed, I admit. But later I came to love her like a daughter.â On the day of the Muslim wedding, Shabana gave Gordon the cache of jewelry she had been saving for the occasion.
Nanjiani, having crossed one boundary by marrying Gordon, started to cross others. In the spring and summer of 2007, he wrote a ninety-minute one-man show about his personal relationship to Islam. He performed it at the Lakeshore Theatre, an august venue in Chicago that has since closed. In the only extant recording of the show, a low-resolution video of the opening-night performance, the theatreâs artistic director introduces Nanjiani by saying, âWeâve had a lot of great shows over the past few months, since we set out to become a Mecca of comedy as artâweâve had Patton Oswalt, Janeane Garofalo, Maria Bamford, Louis C.K. None of them have been as exciting to me as what youâre about to see tonight.â The Mecca pun seemed to be unintentional.
The show was called âUnpronounceable,â after Nanjianiâs first conversation on American soil, with the customs agent who took his passport. (âHe said, âWelcome to America, Mr. . . . this is unpronounceable.â Not âI canât pronounce thatâ or âHow do you pronounce that?â Unpronounceable.â) These days, Nanjiani describes the show in self-deprecating terms, and âThe Big Sickâ includes a cringe-inducing sendup of a cheesy one-man show. If a few moments in âUnpronounceableâ smacked of juveniliaâan overwrought description of a falling snowflake, for exampleâthe writing, on the whole, was heartfelt and trenchant, even when tackling such difficult topics as crises of faith and the tradition of public self-flagellation. The show was a hit, and it allowed Nanjiani to sign with a prominent agent and quit his I.T. job. That October, five months after Gordon left the hospital, she and Nanjiani moved to New York. âItâs not like we ever turned to each other and said, âLife is fleeting, letâs take our shot,â â Nanjiani said. âBut, in hindsight, Emily getting sick was clearly a big event that spurred us to examine our priorities.â
Gordon eventually stopped practicing therapy, and she and Nanjiani moved to Los Angeles and started to collaborate. They co-hosted âThe Indoor Kids,â a podcast about video games, and, with the comedian Jonah Ray, founded a weekly standup showcase called âThe Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail,â which featured a rotating stable of performers curated by Gordon. From 2010 to 2016, the show took place every Wednesday, in a small black-box theatre in the back of a comic-book store on Sunset Boulevardâthe heart of the heart of cool-nerd culture. During a trip to L.A. last year, I happened to catch the last-ever night of âThe Meltdown,â which featured standup by Apatow and a performance by a satirical pro-Trump reggae band. After the show, Nanjiani and Gordon stayed for nearly an hour, greeting and hugging several members of the audience.
Gordon has written personal essays, advice columns, and a cheeky self-help book, âSuper You: Release Your Inner Superhero.â She also spends much of her free time dispensing advice. Most of her friends in L.A. are comedians, and comedians tend to be, as she puts it, âwonderful, kindhearted individuals who sometimes have no fucking clue how to live like grownups.â A few of her friends have compared her to Wendy among the Lost Boys.
In 2013, Nanjiani filmed an hour-long standup special in Austin, Texas. This time, he chose his own walk-on music: a rap song built around a Bollywood sample. In the special, âBeta Male,â he strides across the stage, projecting swagger even as he jokes about being a coward or a creep. The act is inflected with anecdotes about his upbringing. Once, when he was twelve, he was watching a forbidden videotape, and, during one of his neighborhoodâs frequent power outages, it got stuck in the VCR. He imagines running away in shame and having to fend for himself: âAny work needs doing? I can beat Mario and draw a Ninja Turtle.â
At one point during the performance, it became clear that a woman in the audience was from Karachi.
âHowâs Karachi doing?â Nanjiani asked her, from the stage. (He has not been back to Pakistan since college.)
âSame as ever,â she said.
âMostly on fire?â he asked, not without affection.
In 2012, Nanjiani performed at South by Southwest, where he met Apatow. âHe started telling me about that time in his life, in Chicago,â Apatow said. âI went, âThat should be a movie.â â This led to a series of meetings, which led to a series of e-mails, which led to drafts of a screenplay, which, four years later, became âThe Big Sick.â
The scenes in Kumailâs parentsâ house were shot in Douglaston, Long Island. One day last summer, as the crew dusted the front lawn with fake snow, Nanjiani, Gordon, and Showalter sat in the living room, alternating between nimble banter and earnest discussions of gun-control policy. Mendel, the producer, sat in front of a video monitor in the back yard; the houseâs owners had cats, and Mendel was severely allergic.
âFor Emilyâs parents, we went through a normal casting process,â Nanjiani said. The roles went to Holly Hunter and Ray Romano. âWhen we were going to cast my parents, I called my dad and asked, âWho should play you?â and he answered right away: Anupam Kher.â Kher has been a Bollywood star for decades; âThe Big Sickâ was, by his count, his five-hundredth film. While Kher was filming in Douglaston, Nanjianiâs parents insisted on visiting the set, a prospect that made Nanjiani palpably nervous. âThe real world and the world of the movie are not supposed to be this close together,â he said, stepping outside and pacing around the back yard. âThere are things that come up in the script that my parents and I havenât talked about yet.â Earlier that day, theyâd filmed a scene in which Kumailâs mother asks him to go into another room and pray before lunch. Kumail unfurls a prayer rug and sets a timer on his phone; five minutes later, after watching a video and playing with a cricket bat, he rolls up the rug and leaves the room.
Nanjianiâs parents arrived on set and made small talk with Kher. âDoesnât he look like my separated-at-birth twin brother?â Nanjianiâs father, Aijaz, joked. They posed for photos, and Nanjianiâs parents left after about ten minutes. âThat wasnât so bad, was it?â a crew member asked Nanjiani.
Later, I asked him how his relationship with his parents had progressed in the years since the wedding. âItâs a process,â he said. âI think itâs good. They love Emily. We see them a lot. Itâs complicated.â He gathered his thoughts. âIn the movie, the Kumail character and his parents are on step one of figuring all that stuff out. In real life, weâre on step four or five. I donât know how many steps there are.â
When the fictional Emily falls into a coma, the fictional Kumail doesnât know how to contact her parents. To find their phone number, he has to gain access to Emilyâs iPhone. He sits next to her hospital bed and whispers, âSorryâ; then he places her inert thumb on the phoneâs touch pad, unlocking the screen. Reading that moment in the screenplay, I worried that it might seem inauthentic, like something that would happen in a movie but not in real life. When I saw it at Sundance, sitting among eleven hundred people in a sold-out auditorium, the moment landed. From the opening credits onward, the audience was in the filmâs thrall. After Kumail is interrupted by the racist heckler, Emilyâs mother shuts the heckler down; her monologue received a spontaneous mid-scene round of applause. Emilyâs father, eating lunch with Kumail for the first time, leads with an offensive icebreaker: â9/11 . . . Whatâs your stance?â Kumailâs acerbic responseââIt was a tragedy. I mean, we lost nineteen of our best guysââresulted in waves of cathartic laughter.
After the Sundance première, Gordon posted on Instagram, âWe just showed our movie for the first time. 1000 emotions.â The next day, standing on the snowy main drag of Park City, Utah, I asked her to describe a couple of them. âEuphoric?â she said. âShell-shocked? Is nausea an emotion? When the end credits rolled and people started clapping, I had tears in my eyes, and I literally reached down as if to unbuckle my seat belt. Like, my brain was taking the roller-coaster metaphor too literally.â She elbowed Nanjiani. âHe was stoic, as usual.â
âI was overwhelmed!â he said. âThatâs how I process emotions.â
Within a day, Amazon had bought the movie for twelve million dollars, one of the most lucrative deals in Sundance history. (At the previous yearâs festival, Amazon spent ten million dollars on âManchester by the Sea.â) From then on, walking around Park City with Nanjiani was like trailing a groom at his wedding reception. Heads turned when he entered a room; people heâd never met greeted him with handshakes and hugs. His parents had been texting him, thrilled by his success. âThey havenât seen the movie yet,â he said, tentatively. âTheyâre gonna like it, though. I think theyâre gonna like it.â When I spoke with his parents, in April, they still hadnât seen it. âBut we have kept up with the reviews and everything,â Nanjianiâs father said. âRotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Variety, the Hollywood ReporterâI have not seen a single negative review!â
At Sundance, Nanjiani arrived at the Filmmaker Lodge, a venue with rustic wood panelling and moose heads mounted on the walls, to speak on a two-person panel with the actor John Cho. The interviewer noted that both men were born abroad (Cho is from South Korea), and asked whether theyâd felt the burden of âbeing the representative of an entire group of people.â
âFirst, I wanna say that when I started doing standup comedy people were racist to me, and they would call me Kumar, so Iâm sure this is very confusing,â Nanjiani said. He was referring to the 2004 comedy âHarold and Kumar Go to White Castle,â about an Indian-American and a Korean-American embarking on a series of stoned adventures, which was one of the highest-grossing Hollywood movies without a white actor in a lead role. Although Nanjiani didnât appear in the movie, strangers called him âKumarâ so often that he wrote a joke about it. In Nanjianiâs 2013 standup special, he said, âI want to be so famous that Iâm the pop-culture reference that people would make to try and be racist to me. So Iâd be walking down the street and someone would be, like, âHey, look at this Kumail Nanjiani. Oh, fuck, that is Kumail Nanjiani!â â
Cho actually did appear in âHarold and Kumarââhe played Harold. The audience laughed, and then Nanjiani addressed the question sincerely. âI donât go, âIt is now time to change Americansâ perception of Muslims. Itâs going to be a long day,â â he said. âI think you just try to be unique and try to be yourself, and if something good comes of that then great.â On âSilicon Valley,â for example, Nanjianiâs character fulfills some stereotypes and subverts others. He is unfashionable but insists on wearing a gold chain, for which he is roundly mocked; heâs a naturalized American citizen whose nemesis, a white coder from Canada, is an undocumented immigrant. âThat chain idea came directly from Kumailâs life,â Alec Berg, a co-showrunner of âSilicon Valley,â told me. âSo did the details of what itâs like to apply for an American visa. Itâs such a luxury, when youâre trying to write a character that feels grounded in reality, to be able to avoid drawing on stereotypes and instead just take Kumail out to lunch and say, âTell me about your life.â â
After the panel, in the greenroom, Nanjiani expanded on his thoughts about representation. âPeople use these words so much that they can start to sound meaningless,â he said. âBut I believe it matters. The stories you see as a kid show you whatâs possible. I mean, Iâm almost forty, and when I saw a brown guy kicking ass in the new âStar Warsâ movie I started crying in the movie theatre.â
He went on, âEveryone knows what a secular Jew looks like. Everyone knows what a lapsed Catholic looks like. Thatâs all over pop culture. But there are very few Muslim characters who arenât terrorists, who arenât even going to a mosque, who are just people with complicated backstories who do normal things. Obviously, terrorism is an important subject to tackle. But we also need Muslim characters who, like, go to Six Flags and eat ice cream.â â¦