You Can’t Be Serious(31)
I chose to read the scene again with an Indian accent.
I tried hard to remain grounded in the backstory I created for Prajeeb as I served up the ridiculous off-menu Indian lilt that many of the white folks in my professional life couldn’t seem to get enough of. I barely got the first line out before all the producers’ faces lit up with glee and they were laughing much harder than any sane person should laugh at a sitcom about a talking cat.
Forget the talking cat. I felt like a dancing monkey.
They proudly smiled as though they had accomplished a great feat and thanked me for coming back from the parking lot. I analyzed things on the drive home. It’s not that I think an accent alone makes a one-dimensional stereotype. Lots of people have accents in real life, and lots of those people are cabdrivers and store clerks. A problem arises when we focus on the working-class nature of certain professions to protest a stereotype (oh man, he has to play a cabdriver)—as if being a cabdriver is inherently a bad thing, or that honest work is something to look down on. What really makes these roles one-dimensional stereotypes is that the person’s ethnicity or race is the focus of who they are as a character, which tends to be the case when it comes to the Hollywood version of cabdrivers and store clerks, or actors who are asked to put on hokey accents for no reason despite having prepared a full backstory for the character.
Racial signifiers are stereotypical because they’re reductionist, yes. They’re also artistically boring because they mean that a character rarely has any agency. Everything is tied to identity. Is the character hungry? Curry jokes! Sleepy? Probably because of a mystical Indian spell. Going shopping for clothes? Probably a sari. Zzzzzz. Those characters don’t advance the plot. They just function to serve the arcs of the white characters. Stereotypical representation is dehumanizing when it removes the full breadth of what it means to be a living, breathing, multidimensional person with traits that are independent of identity.
Nobody was around when I got back to the house I shared with some of the homies, so I did some push-ups on the cold blue tile in the kitchen, contemplated making a screwdriver (the only cocktail I knew how to make), and dreaded what I assumed was the happy phone call coming any minute now.
When Barbara told me I got the part, I told her what happened. “Is there any way I could do it without the accent? There’s no reason for Prajeeb to have one.” A seasoned agent and talented stage mom, Barbara suggested that I accept the much-needed job and said I should ask the director in person when I got to the set. “These things are often better posed as creative conversations during production,” she encouraged. It made sense to me. Besides, a month’s rent.
During the week before the shoot, I was so nervous that I spent more time rehearsing what I was going to say to the director than I did my lines in the episode. I felt totally robbed of what should be the pure joy of booking a coveted television role. I so badly wanted to experience what the white actors got to experience when their agents called with the good news that they booked their first roles: excitement, dreams that come true, hard work that’s paid off. I resented the fact that I instead found myself thinking about identity, about politics, about any of that shit. I just wanted to play the human version of the damn character.
On the morning of the shoot, I found the amiable director cozied up next to the coffee cart on the soundstage and politely made my case. “You have such a funny show,” I told him. “I’m so thankful to be joining you for this hilarious little part! I was just hoping, you know, that maybe I could play Prajeeb without the Indian accent?” His mood turned so fast you’d have thought I asked for something crazy, like the scene in the Borat sequel when Tutar’s father questions if his daughter can attend the debutante ball even though “her moon blood has arrived.” The director wasn’t shy about what he thought of me. “You’re doing that accent.”
I told myself maybe he’s just not educated about this. Maybe if he just knew better, he’d agree with me. Sure, it didn’t work with Captain Moneybags, but not all white producers and directors are the same, right? I brought up the creative backstory I’d crafted for Prajeeb, told him why I didn’t think an Indian accent was necessary for the humor of a guy I purposely grounded in northwestern American values.
The flannel!
Pearl Jam!
His eyes narrowed. He was very angry. “We hired you to do the accent and that’s what you’re doing, got it?”
My final plea.
“I just thought it would be nice for my little cousins to see me in a role that wasn’t a stereotype,” I said, hoping to assure my participation wouldn’t fuel a new generation of middle-school David Cohens. “Stereotypes are all I ever saw on TV growing up.” He looked at me with laser-focused eyes, and for a brief moment I wondered if I had gotten through to him.
“Your little cousins should be happy you get to be on a TV show at all. And so should you.”
I went through the rest of the day hating the job. It wasn’t that I expected to convince him that Prajeeb didn’t need an accent (although that was my hope and certainly part of the sting). It was the way I was being spoken to. The subtext of what he wanted. The complete awareness and purposefulness of the director’s decision to require a stereotypical accent, knowing that it was reductionist and othering. I finally had another TV gig and I wasn’t even enjoying it. That’s what $700 was worth to me in August 2000.