Kumail Nanjiani goes to Hollywood

One year ago, The A.V. Club talked to Kumail Nanjiani just as he’d moved from Chicago to New York, finished up his first season as a writer and actor on Comedy Central’s Michael and Michael Have Issues, and was making his way as a stand-up one high-profile opening slot at a time. 

Flash forward to August, 2010: Nanjiani’s moved to Los Angeles after the prolonged demise of Michael And Michael, frantically auditioned his way through TV pilot season, and is about to start filming Franklin And Bash, a TNT comedy series starring Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Breckin Meyer, and Malcolm McDowell. In the midst of all this, he’s found time to come back to Chicago for a headlining show at The Hideout this weekend. A lot of stuff can happen in a year, and The A.V. Club caught up with Nanjiani so he could explain “the biz” once again.

The A.V. Club: What are you up to in L.A.? 

Kumail Nanjiani: I moved here two months ago. Franklin And Bash starts shooting Sept. 20, so I’m trying to get a bunch of stand-up road dates in before that. 

AVC: What's Franklin And Bash about?

KN: It’s about hippie “take down the man” lawyers who get absorbed into a huge corporate law firm. It’s the first time I’ll be playing a character I didn’t have a hand in writing, so that should be interesting to have to be subservient to someone else—and I mean that in a good way. 

AVC: Are you nervous at all? 

KN: Not really, no. I trust the creators. My only job on the show is to be funny. When I auditioned, they let me improvise lines, so when they hired me, they wanted me to do that a little more, staying within the character they created. I don’t think I got the part because I was the best actor, but because I had the best ideas for the character they created.

AVC: How's auditioning going, overall?

KN: The hardest thing about the audition process is that most times you don’t get the part because you’re just not right for it. You’re too small, too tall, whatever. It’s still hard to feel you did a good job and not get it, though. 

It’s hard sometimes, though, because I auditioned for one thing [30 Minutes Or Less, also starring Aziz Ansari and Jesse Eisenberg] I thought was a good project, and I thought I had a good shot. Then I read that Danny McBride got the part, and I thought, “Why am I auditioning for something he got? He’s a huge movie star.” 

AVC: What else have you gone out for and not gotten?

KN: Last year I was pretty close to getting the part of Abed on Community. It was the only show I auditioned for that pilot season, and I was upset when I didn’t get the part. Then I watched the show, and realized they got the right guy for it. Danny Pudi is fucking amazing in that role. You have to keep the whole thing in perspective. If you don’t get the part, it’s because they know what they’re doing, and I’m just not right for it. 

AVC: Is there anything you’ve auditioned for you didn’t want to get? 

KN: I originally came to L.A. at the beginning of the year for pilot season, where you’re doing two or three auditions every single day, and you get into this weird mode where you’re auditioning for everything, even if you don’t like it, or don’t know what it is. You’re auditioning for shows you would never watch, let alone want to be in them. You’re caring about parts you don’t care about at all. 

I got close to a few things I’m glad I didn’t get because they’re not things I wanted to do, but it’s hard to turn them down. It’s so much money and so much exposure. 

AVC: Two or three auditions a day? How does pilot season actually work? 

KN: Pilot season starts at the end of January and goes until April. Monday, a studio would decide they were going to make a pilot. Tuesday, they’d hire a director. Wednesday, they’d audition actors. I’d read about a show getting picked up, call my agent, and schedule an audition. 

On the shows I was close to getting, I did two auditions, and then a studio casting, where you go read in front of 15 or 20 studio executives—the studio that makes the show, not necessarily the network that airs the show. You’d go in, read lines for one minute, and then later that day, you’d get a call about whether you’d move forward to network casting. For the network test, it’s generally down to just two people, and you read for about 45 seconds in front of four or five top NBC executives, for example. Like, the top people. They don’t give you notes. They don’t ask you to do it another way. You just get a call afterwards whether you got the job or not. 

AVC: What are the actual odds on getting a pilot made?

KN: The networks decide from about 100 comedy pilot tests, pay to shoot 20, and ultimately take four or five to series.  A lot of really good people have done NBC pilots that didn’t get picked up. Tom Lennon and Ben Garant did a pilot that never got picked up. Adam Carolla made a pilot that never got picked up. 

If the network does pick it up, there’s sometimes re-casting. It’s terrifying waiting to hear if it’s going to get picked up, and then when it does, you’re terrified waiting to hear if you’re going to get re-cast. 

AVC: You’re Pakistani. With Outsourced coming to NBC this fall, there’s been a lot of talk about it being a good time to be Indian or Pakistani in the industry. What’s been your experience on that front? 

KN: I made a decision that I wouldn’t audition for anything that made me put on a thicker accent. Not that all parts like that are bad, like if it’s someone that legitimately just got off a plane from India or Pakistan, but there are people that would just do that a lot better than I would. My character on Franklin And Bash is Indian, but his Indian-ness isn’t his defining characteristic. I did read a lot of things this past pilot season where heavy Indian-ness is the character’s hook, though. 

It’s hard to turn down stuff when you’re faced with it, even if big picture-wise, it’s not a good idea. The money’s good. The exposure’s good. You’re working. 

AVC: How do people working on really shitty projects live with themselves? 

KN: The cliché is that everyone in L.A. is in the industry, but it’s actually true. People work on things every day that are terrible, and even if they know it’s terrible, they’ll say it’s awesome. I don’t know if it’s a coping mechanism to make it through life, but I would have meetings with people where they would talk about the movies they’re working on, and how important they are, and all I could think was, “Wait, no. That’s going to be terrible.” 

AVC: It seems like a perspective problem. 

KN: Most people in L.A. just want to talk about the industry, so it’s hard to keep it as a separate part of your life. There’s the stereotype of the self-involved celebrity who can only think about themselves and movies, and it seems ridiculous, but when you’re here, you can totally see how it happens. It’s really hard to keep perspective. 

AVC: How is L.A. really different from New York? 

KN: New York is so gritty, expensive, and hard to live in. You have to work pretty hard to stay afloat, and a lot of comedians work two other jobs to pay rent. In L.A., it’s a lot more comfortable. Most people work half the year, and the other half they don’t do anything. They just hang out, sit on the balcony, whatever. They do one thing a day, like, “Today I went to the gym.” You don’t have to work very hard to get by.

AVC: How does the comedy scene compare? 

KN: In New York, stand-ups are valued for their very personal, very natural storytelling style. I could just talk about what happened that day and people are interested. In L.A., you have to tell more punch line, jokey-jokes. I had to rework some of my material. You know that '80s stand-up cadence? In New York, if an audience hears that, they shut down right away. You have to smuggle the joke in. Here, you have to get right to the point.

AVC: What actually happened behind the scenes with the cancellation of Michael And Michael Have Issues?  

KN: It was really hard for me to find out about Michael And Michael getting cancelled. We were proud when we finished shooting that first season. We realized when we saw the episodes that there were areas could be improved, but we knew what had to be fixed. 

It took six months for us to find out it had been canceled, and the network kept stringing us along. We kept hearing “next week, next week we’ll know.” They kept us hanging for a really long time. We actually got paid to start writing the second season, not knowing if it would get picked up. 

AVC: Really? What happened in the second season? 

KN: It was going to be pretty different. We built on the strengths of the first season, and came up with 10 episodes that had a big, over-arching story. It was about how Michael and Michael fall out with each other trying to make their show more popular. The show [within a show] got really shitty, and turned into something they weren’t proud of, so they have to deal with that tension and with issues of selling out. 

For a long time I thought we’d get picked up. Then [Michael] Showalter texted me in February and just said, “Hey, we got cancelled,” and it was just like that. Six months of waiting, anticipating and hoping, and it’s done. I got pretty disillusioned, and it’s why I felt like I had to leave New York.