The comic actor raised eyebrows with his muscle-bound look for his role in Marvel’s Eternals. Now he’s gone the opposite way to play the sleazy founder of the Chippendales
“I didn’t see myself any differently when I had that bodily transformation,” Nanjiani says. “People’s reactions were different, though, and it’s still different. There are people who think that I’ve completely changed as a human being because of how I look, but all I did was spend 40 years a certain kind of way and then a year and a half a slightly different kind of way.”
Nanjiani has gone back to the small screen to portray Somen “Steve” Banerjee, the real-life founder of the Chippendales. Set in the sordid, money-grubbing 80s, Welcome to Chippendales documents India-born Banerjee’s descent from hard-working immigrant to a prejudiced, profiteering businessman who obsesses over rivalries with competitors and business partners, leading to arson, murder-for-hire and a high-profile court case.
As well as getting into the soft shape of Banerjee, Nanjiani also had to get into his mind – especially his justification of increasingly corrupt behaviour as a reaction to the standards of the majority-white society he was working in. “That was something I could understand,” Nanjiani says. “Even though Steve is so far removed from my life, you can’t judge a character when you’re playing them; you have to find a point of connection.
Success seemed a long shot for Nanjiani when it came to starting out in comedy. Moving from his home of Karachi to attend college in Iowa, Nanjiani caught the bug for standup by studying routines from the likes of Mitch Hedberg and Zach Galafinakis. By the time he graduated in 2001, audience reactions to a Muslim man on stage were becoming fraught.“I only got into standup because I wanted to write jokes. It was a necessary evil,” he says.
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