Kumail Nanjiani is known best for his work in comedy (or his recent entrance into the Marvel Cinematic Universe), but the new Hulu series Welcome to Chippendales represents a number of big changes for him. For one thing, he’s playing a dramatic role, and for another, he’s playing a character based on a real person, a rare opportunity for him as an actor of color.
“If this series was fictional,” he tells Consequence, “there’s no way they would cast a brown guy in the lead. The only reason I’m in this is because that’s what really happened. We don’t really get opportunities to play characters like this.”
In the series, Nanjiani plays Somen “Steve” Banerjee, who co-founded the original Chippendales club in 1979 and oversaw it becoming an internationally recognized brand. But as the series depicts, his rivalry with business partner Nick De Noia (Murray Bartlett) eventually escalated into a full-on feud with bloody and tragic consequences.
Nanjiani says that while he initially resisted taking on the role, the complicated nature of Steve as a character made this a part he loved playing. In this interview, which you can watch in the video above or read via the edited transcript below, he explains why he found Steve’s journey so compelling. He also reveals that despite earlier reports, the show’s title was never going to be Immigrant, and reveals that after getting into superhero shape for Eternals, he took it much easier while shooting Chippendales.
So I want to start by asking you, as someone who knows what it takes to get into the kind of shape you need to get into to be a Chippendales dancer — did that affect the way you related to the actors playing those dancers?
A little bit. Mostly I was just grateful that I didn’t have to do it. I could eat whatever I wanted and I did — I had a really great time culinarily on this set. I ate whatever I wanted, and we would get these awesome food trucks and I would eat ice cream every day. It was really, really great.
You would eat the ice cream in front of the dancers?
Yeah. Just to be like, “Oh, look, you could have this life too. Just put on a big suit.”
Yeah, the suits look really nice and comfy.
They are, they’re also quite stiff, but they helped me get into character.
So I know that this is a project that came to you and I’m curious: If you had stumbled across this story on your own, is it something you would have considered developing for yourself?
Yeah, I would have. I’ve actually sort of been looking around to see if there were true stories of immigrants that had interesting navigations of success in America, or the American dream. There’s actually another one I just found recently that I was like, “Oh man, I would love to play this.” There’s actually a couple of them.
So if I had found this story on my own, yeah, I would’ve definitely tried to develop it, but I was lucky in that I didn’t have to do that. Rob Siegel had found it and sort of done the hard work for me and just came to me and was like, “Hey, I’m Rob Siegel,” and I’m like, “I know who you are, I’m a big fan of yours.” And he was like, “Okay, great. Let’s do this thing.” Robert had done so much of the work for me that this was… I’m just very grateful that he thought that I could do this.
Does completing this have you interested in doing more dramatic work down the line?
I would love to — I would love to do something like this again. But soon as I finished this, I was like, “The next thing has to be a comedy, because this is really fun and thrilling, but I am exhausted. I want to go back to comedy.” So my next thing is a comedy and then I’m going to go back, hopefully right after that, to do something that’s dramatic like this.
It’s good to sort of rip off the bandaid and do something like this and know what it feels like and find out that I can do this. That it’s challenging, but also exciting in a completely different way than doing comedy is exciting. So yeah, hopefully when this comes out, people see me doing something different and I start to get more opportunities to play characters like this. I would love that.
Absolutely. I feel like if you’re not a straight white man, the opportunities to play people in real life, people in biopics like this, are relatively limited. So it’s always exciting when these opportunities do arise.
Yeah. And I was thinking that if this series was completely written, and if it was fictional, there’s no way they would cast a brown guy in the lead. The only reason I’m in this is because that’s what really happened. We don’t really get opportunities to play characters like this. Rob always said that this was Scarface with a nerdy Indian guy. What a gift.
Do you feel like that enhances the tragedy of the story? The fact that this isn’t, this isn’t Pacino, it’s you.
I think the story really is tragic because you see how hard it is for him to succeed. So hopefully, if I’ve done my job right, you’re rooting for him in the beginning. You know there are people who take advantage of him. There are certain ways he’s savvy, but many ways that he’s not. He’s really an underdog in the beginning. Paul Snider, played by Dan Stevens, takes advantage of him in some ways. Nick De Noia, played by Murray Bartlett, takes advantage of him. So he’s this guy who’s taken advantage of and discounted.
I think it’s really important that one of the first times you see him, he has a racist incident happen to him, so you really get what his experience is and you feel his underdog nature. I think that was always such an interesting thing for me, to have the audiences negotiate that — to see someone who has it really tough work really hard and get the success they want. And you want to root for him, and then he goes down a path, a path that makes it impossible for the audience to root for him. I always thought that was really interesting. I thought that that would be a challenging thing for people to watch.
Welcome to Chippendales (Hulu)
Yeah, there’s that great scene that’s featured in the trailer, where Annaleigh Ashford is telling him, essentially, you have all these amazing things, and all you have to do to hold onto them is not let yourself get dragged into this.
Yeah, and I think the interesting thing about Steve is he has all these women in his life that he really does listen to. He never listens to the men, but he listens to Irene, he listens to his mother and he listens to Dorothy, played by Nicola [Peltz] in Episode 1. He really likes her ideas. He actually values her input. She comes up with cuffs and collars and he calls her a genius. He doesn’t call anybody else a genius. So I think it was always interesting that somehow he’s not threatened by the women, so he actually listens to them, but he’s threatened by the men, and so he has to dominate them.
And I think his relationship with Irene is very, very interesting. It’s very essential, because I think the only time he likes himself is when he sees himself through her eyes. It’s the only time he feels comfortable in his own skin. The only times he’s really, really himself and calm is when he’s with her. And I think that that moment really gets at that, where if he kept listening to her, things would be okay. There’s a moment in the show where he lies to her for the first time, and that was like a very thoughtful thing. I wanted him to be different after the first time he lies to her. Something changes inside of him, and that sort of is the beginning of the end.
Something I’m curious about is the fact that the original title for this project, at least in the early days of reporting, was Immigrant. Welcome to Chippendales sets a very different tone — what were your thoughts were on that change?
Actually, the show was never going to be called Immigrant. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know why that was in the announcement. I was very upset about it. We were always like, “We have to figure out a name for this thing.” So it was never going to be called Immigrant.
There was a time it was going to be called More, More, More. I thought that was interesting because there’s a song, but it’s also what Steve wants, right? It really gets at what it is. It also gets at what the ’80s were like in America, where it was just about excess and opulence, you know? It took us a long time to see the title Welcome to Chippendales. It’s so perfect and so simple. It took us a long time to get to that. We went through a lot of bad options. But Immigrant was never one of them.
I’m sorry, I didn’t know that.
That’s okay. It’s not your fault. I mean, I saw the announcements too, and I was like, “What the? That’s not what this show’s called.”
I like that you knew “That’s not what the show’s called,” even though you didn’t know what it actually was called yet.
Yeah, I only know what it’s not called for sure. It’s not called what they think it’s called.
To wrap things up, when people are watching this show, when people are digging into it, what are you hoping they take away? What kind of impact are you hoping it has?
I just want people to enjoy it. You know, there’s just a lot of wild stuff that happens in it, and I think that they did such a good job of evoking the world, the ’70s and ’80s in LA. Its has such a wonderful sense of time and place. I just want people to get lost in it and have a great time watching the show.
The takeaway, you know, I can’t decide that. I think people watch it and they come to their own conclusions about it, but obviously, there’s something about the nature of greed and it never being enough. That’s the way corporations in America are set up, is if you don’t grow, you’re a failure. There’s no right size for a company except bigger than they currently are.
And that’s how I think people view success in America, too. It’s never enough. No matter what you do, you always going to die of failure because you’re never able to achieve what you wanted. Because what you wanted is unachievable, because it’s gonna be always two steps ahead of you. That’s just the nature of how I think of how capitalism in America is set up. So that’s what the show makes me think of. But I don’t know what other people are gonna take away from it.
New episodes of Welcome to Chippendales premiere Tuesdays on Hulu.