You Can’t Be Serious(36)

Finding out that the casting team was letting random auntie and uncles’ perfect science-major kids audition for this film made me feel like my eyes would bleed. Kids like Gita (“Why are you studying? Aren’t you just, like, a theater major?”), Varun (“my safety is Hopkins”), and Aarti (“seven-year combined medical program!”)—they could audition for this?! Nikhil was going to Yale AND maybe getting the part of Taj Mahal Badalandabad?

I couldn’t let some sciencey Indian kid beat me out of this role. I couldn’t slip back into self-pity. I had to dig into remembering what I loved about storytelling and the arts to begin with, channel those days at my performing arts high school, bring back some of my East Coast hustle, pick up my ax and thrust my pelvis out again.

I needed to go rogue: If they were soliciting audition tapes from anyone who was Indian—actor or not—then I would make a tape too and send it along with a note to the casting director. “Is that a dumb idea?” I asked my agent. I could sense her smiling over the phone. “What do you have to lose?” she said.

I spent the next couple of days working hard on the material all over again. A talented director I met through friends two years prior, Senain Kheshgi, was nice enough to help me rehearse and professionally tape the audition scenes in her apartment. Before sending it off, I wrote a heartfelt letter to Barbara Fiorentino, letting her know that although I had already come in to audition for her, I was sending a tape because unlike the people she was auditioning from Indian Student Unions around the country, I was a trained actor, confident I could do professional justice to the role. I sent it off in the spirit of a man frustrated, desperate—and motivated.

I didn’t know it at the time, but over the course of that period, Fiorentino’s frantic search of Indian Student Union aspirants had actually turned out to be a resounding success. She had gotten hundreds of audition tapes from Taj hopefuls all over the country. She hadn’t slept in days, instead watching tape after tape of mostly abysmal auditions from every Indian man aged eighteen to fifty who had been forwarded her casting notice. She was relieved to finally find a premed undergrad from Stanford who was absolutely perfect for the role of Taj Mahal. The producers cast him, and everything was set to go. It was just a couple of weeks until principal photography was to begin. Unfortunately for Barbara Fiorentino, when Dr. Stanford told his parents that he had been cast in a movie and needed to take a semester off from college, they freaked out and forbade him from doing it. “What is this acting-bacting nonsense? You are going to medical school! You are going to be an oncologist!”4

She had searched the country and found what she thought was the right brown guy, only to be met with the dreaded Uncle and Auntie veto just as rehearsals and camera tests were set to begin. Totally exhausted and overcome, Fiorentino found herself crawling under her desk, crying on her office floor on her hands and knees while sorting—in desperation and defeat—through a late pile of VHS tapes that had been received in the days since she thought she’d found her Taj. Through wet eyes and intense fatigue, she opened a few of these new envelopes, including mine, the only one to include a letter. I remember this kid, she thought to herself. He was really good. I don’t know why the producers didn’t respond to his audition. She watched my tape and wiped away a few tears. This is our Taj. Suddenly, I was back in the picture. Fiorentino took the tape to the producers and told them they needed to audition me in person. With no mention of my prior rejection, I was sent straight to the final audition, known as the “chemistry test.”

It was down to me and one other Indian actor I heard they’d found along the way. I knew nothing about my competition except that each of us would read scenes with Ryan Reynolds, and the producers and director would see which of the two Tajs fit best.

I was very curious for intel on my competition. What did he look like? Was this dude good-looking? Tall? Was he even a full-time actor like me? Or was he one of the many Indian college students who thought it would be fun to audition for a movie?

None of the above.

When I walked into the waiting room for the chemistry test, I saw that my competition was… a white dude. Wearing brown makeup. Though it was common, I’ll let that sink in for a minute. I was up for the role of an Indian foreign exchange student named Taj Mahal against a white dude in brownface. Any reservations I had about taking the part vanished.5

I encountered brownface regularly enough in those days that I often assume everyone can relate to how widespread and not shocking it was. This is not to say it wasn’t deeply maddening (it always was), but in writing the first draft of this chapter, for instance, I didn’t anticipate my editor’s notes: “This is quite shocking! And horrifying! Please give us some examples.” There are too many to list. You can safely assume that any audition I went on, for a role written specifically Indian, included a number of white actors who (with the right makeup) could “pass” for Indian according to the producers. (To illustrate how not long ago this was with a frame of reference, the NSYNC song “Bye Bye Bye” had already been out for more than a year.)

Some of our most memorable shows and revered artists have utilized brownface. Most people know about Peter Sellers (1968), Fisher Stevens (1986), and Hank Azaria (today). Less-obvious instances, like Harvey Jason in Jurassic Park (1997), Max Minghella in The Social Network (2010), one hundred extras in Aladdin (2019), and Rob Schneider in a bunch of stuff, make you go, “Oh right. This is still a thing.” The practice is still common enough today that I couldn’t write this chapter without mentioning it. Given the widespread, systemic nature of it, it was impossible to hold personal beef against every actor who showed up in brownface. It made me angry, yes. Livid. It also made me feel lonely, with a decisive lack of support from the Indian American community, and the reality that every actor is just looking for a gig. The philosophy seemed to be: It’s super competitive out there. You do what you gotta do.