Entertainment / Up Close: Q&A With Aasif Mandvi

Up Close: Q&A With Aasif Mandvi

Entertainment Jun 06, 2013

by Anokhi Admin

With his new movie, Today's Special in theatres, he sits down with us to chat about his new release and what's really cookin' in the kitchen and in his mind.

It all started out simply enough for Aasif Mandvi: a few minor film/TV appearances and a one-man, off-Broadway show called Sakina's Restaurant about his experience as an immigrant. Flash-forward 12 years and the Mumbai-born actor-comedian is not only a veteran of the New York theatre scene, but an in-demand supporting player who's appeared in TV shows like CSI, Jericho and Sex and the City as well as major productions like Spider-Man 2, Ghost Town and The Last Airbender. Just ahead of the US release of his film, Today's Special this past Friday, we sat down with Aasif to chat about the film, how he wound up on The Daily Show, and why he was slapped in the face at Disney World And, of course, we'd be remiss not to mention his hard-hitting faux-investigative reporting as the Senior Asia/Middle East/(insert random area of expertise here) Correspondent on Comedy Central's Emmy-magnet, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

But with Today's Special, his new "feel-good foodie film," you could say that it's all come full circle. In the movie, which is based on that early acclaimed one-man excursion into show business, Aasif plays Samir, a sous-chef who reconnects with his heritage when he goes back home to run his father's failing Indian restaurant in New York. It's funny and poignant, but most of all a very personal film, tied to Mandvi's own experiences as a displaced citizen of the world.

ANOKHI: Let's start with your humble beginnings. I've read that after university, you were employed as a performer at Walt Disney World. What exactly did that involve and are there any interesting/horribly embarrassing experiences you care to reminisce about?
Aasif: I was hired as a performer at Disney-MGM Studios out of college. I was hired in a street improvisational comedy troupe called Streetmosphere. And Streetmosphere was basically characters that lived in Hollywood in the 1940s…and we would play all these improvisational games with the guests that came through.

It was a great gig. I was right out of college and I got this job working at a studio, at that time making more money than I'd ever seen.

The only real embarrassing thing that happened was somebody slapped me (laughs). And it was kind of a joke; I didn't expect them to actually slap me. I played this character who was a New York City cab driver who basically was stuck in Hollywood. I had this beautiful 1937 DeSoto that was sitting on the side of the street as my cab and I asked this guy, in some way, to "slap me", but more to slap me into reality, like as a metaphor. And he actually did, he like slapped me across the face in front of all these people, and of course you can't slap back, so that was kind of weird. But there weren't that many hugely embarrassing scenarios.

You were born in India, and raised in England and America. How has being a citizen of the world influenced you as a person and an entertainer?
That's an interesting question, actually. I think it has influenced my basic psyche. I've lived in different places in the world, so I don't have that sense of belonging to any one place. My adult life beyond high school and college has been in America, but my childhood was England. So there's definitely a little Lord Fauntleroy inside of me; there's this little snobby English kid. It's made me a little bit of a chameleon in some ways.

I come from an Indian background; my parents are Indian, my heritage, culture, Muslim family, all that stuff. But then [there's this] Western [influence]. And I think that's true of a lot of immigrants. But I think if I had been born in America and grew up here, I would feel much more belonging to one place.

I think it helped; I think it totally helped my perspective in some ways, but it's also confusing, because I don't really feel like I belong to a particular place.

You're probably best known for your work as a correspondent on The Daily Show. Talk about landing the gig; I hear you appeared on-air the day you were hired. Yikes!
Yeah, it was August 9, 2006 and I came in and I auditioned for Jon [Stewart]. They were looking for a Middle East correspondent and they had me come in. I auditioned for him and he hired me right there on that day and then I was on-air that night doing this piece that they had written. So nobody in my family, none of my friends knew that I was gonna be on The Daily Show, I just suddenly popped up on The Daily Show and people started calling me.

It was a remarkable experience; I was always a really big fan of the show. And initially it was just a one-time gig, and then Jon just kept calling me back and having me do more stuff on the show. I think I went through about a six-month trial period and then after that they offered me a job in early '07.

How politically active/engaged are you once you take off your "Senior _____ Correspondent" hat?
How politically active am I? Only [with] the things that I personally care about. I'm not one of these people that is constantly on Gawker.com, you know what I mean? I gravitate toward stuff that I personally care about. A lot of the stuff on The Daily Show that I pitch and that I am interested in covering myself is stuff that I personally care about and that personally speaks to me. So, it has been a venue for that and a vehicle for that.

What type of projects do you find yourself most drawn to?
Good writing is always key. You can have the most original idea that can be destroyed by mediocre or less than mediocre writing. Or you can have the most mundane idea that can be elevated by really smart writing. If I think it's smartly written, you start with that; then you go, does this actually have any resonance in me or in any way.

And that's not to say that sometimes you don't just take a job for money, because you do. There's often things where you kinda go "Alright, I'll make a lot of money doing this," or "I'll get a lot of exposure doing this."

You've gotta know what you're doing it for.

You've been involved in some pretty high profile projects in the last few years. Any notion of what you bring the table as an actor that audiences respond to?
You know what, I don't even know. That's not even a question that I can answer because the minute I start to dissect that kind of stuff, then I lose whatever is the thing that either makes people want to see my work or not want to see my work. So it's not a question that I can answer.

You've got a lot of things on the go right now, including Today's Special, which you co-wrote. What inspired you to make this film? Is it more personal than other projects you've been involved with?
I guess it's the most personal thing that I've done since Sakina's Restaurant. What inspired me, I guess, was the confluence of me having written a play that was about my immigrant experience and my immigrant family and all that stuff, called Sakina's Restaurant. And that became the inspiration point.

Couple that with Jon Bines, who co-wrote the movie with me. He was a former writer for The Daily Show, he now writes for Jimmy Kimmel. He was also a foodie [and] we were in a sketch comedy group together. So we had the combination of my immigrant family and the characters I had written based on them, and I had the story sort of in my pocket and then there was Jon and his obsession with food and then we had the commonality of the comedy world that we both lived in and worked in and shared, so we kind of brought it all together.

What would you peg as the main theme or message of the film? What do you expect audiences to take away from it?
For me, the main message of the film is a very simple message; it's really about integration. It's about the integrity of Samir's character. I'm fascinated by this idea of wholeness and how we disassociate from various parts of ourselves. And this is about reclaiming parts of one's self. In a very kind of commercial, fun, Hollywood way, we've written a film that is about a guy who reclaims himself or reclaims an aspect of himself that he has disassociated from. And [it's] because of that disassociation that he cannot be whole in life and cannot achieve all that he wants to achieve. Really that's what the movie's about for me.

Lastly, you've rubbed elbows on-screen with some heavy hitters in the entertainment industry: Drew Barrymore, Ricky Gervais, Tobey Maguire, former King of the Hill writer/story editor (and current Daily Show correspondent) Wyatt Cenac. Ever found yourself a little starstruck?
Only by Wyatt, because he insists that I act starstruck around him. Everyone else was just like regular people, but Wyatt was just such a presence and he also just insists that everyone who meets him treat him with the proper level of awe.

BY: MATTHEW CURRIE

_{Sources: Twitter, IMDb.com, hbo.com, thedailyshow.com}

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Up Close: Q&A With Aasif Mandvi

by Anokhi Admin

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