Yes, My Accent Is Real Page 13

  So I wrote an over-the-top emotional appeal, saying that the reason I didn’t have a higher GPA was that I was also a business student, juggling two course loads, taking marketing classes all day and then theater at night. This was the truth. None of the other theater students was doing that. Besides, what did my C in Portfolio Risk Analysis have to do with an ability to play Moth? I had an A in all my acting classes, and I was applying to acting school. I explained all of this in the letter, and laced it with about a thousand “pretty pleases.”

  The letter did the trick, or maybe it was the “pretty pleases”; either way, they waived the GPA requirement and accepted me. (Takeaway: It’s not over even when they say it’s over. Always write the letter. Always appeal to a human to render a final judgment. We are human, after all.)

  So, I had made it, right? I had been accepted into one of the most prestigious acting programs in the world. No more feeling like an outsider. No more feeling insecure. No more fretting about not getting the lead roles. Or getting roles at all. I had finally made it.

  Or had I?

  The first opportunity was our production of Romeo & Juliet. I was so fired up. Now, finally, I would have the chance to play Romeo. This time I wouldn’t just be the comedic sidekick—I could show my dramatic chops. I’ve always wanted to play Romeo. For years I would whisper these words under my breath.

  She speaks:

  O, speak again, bright angel! for thou art

  As glorious to this night, being o’er my head

  As is a winged messenger of heaven

  Unto the white-upturned wondering eyes

  Of mortals that fall back to gaze on him

  When he bestrides the lazy-pacing clouds

  And sails upon the bosom of the air.

  I only had one competitor for the role, a guy named Mike. The director auditioned us both in the same room at the same time, having us read the very same lines. It was awkward.

  “Kunal, now you read.”

  O, speak again, bright angel!

  “Mike, your turn.”

  O, speak again, bright angel!

  It was almost like kissing your girlfriend while she’s also kissing her ex-boyfriend in the same room and trying to choose between the two of you. But it didn’t really matter. I knew I had the stronger read. I had whispered those words thousands of times. I was Romeo.

  The next day I walked up to the casting sheet and saw “Romeo . . . Mike.”

  Here we go again.

  It was Cabaret all over again. Had nothing changed? I was angry with the director, angry with Mike, angry with Temple, angry with the whole goddamn world. I stormed out of the theater, just as I did a few years before. I wanted everyone to see me mad.

  It’s amazing how we continue to make the same mistakes in life over and over again. We repeat the same cycles of failure, long after we should have learned the lesson. Once again I resorted to my old defense mechanisms: They didn’t want a brown Romeo. I secretly accused Mike of stealing all my choices in the audition. I questioned the entire premise of Temple—the whole reason I’m here is to grow as an actor, so why not let me grow by playing Romeo?

  They ultimately cast me as Benvolio, and even though he is one of the male leads, I still took this as an insult. You don’t see me as the good-looking lothario, you see me as the funny second banana. It stung. Always the jilted bridesmaid, that’s me.

  I did everything I could do to be the best Benvolio possible; I wanted everyone to know I was the harder-working actor. I mean, I supported Mike and the rest of the cast and I rooted for the play’s success. But it wasn’t easy. The jealousy boiled in my blood. Every rehearsal I watched Mike give his lines and I thought, I care about this so much more than you do. Every day was a struggle.

  There’s one speech in particular that Romeo gives to Friar Laurence:

  But Romeo may not; he is banished:

  Flies may do this, but I from this must fly:

  They are free men, but I am banished.

  And say’st thou yet that exile is not death?

  Hadst thou no poison mix’d, no sharp-ground knife,

  No sudden mean of death, though ne’er so mean,

  But “banished” to kill me?—“banished”?

  O friar, the damned use that word in hell;

  Howlings attend it: how hast thou the heart,

  Being a divine, a ghostly confessor,

  A sin-absolver, and my friend profess’d,

  To mangle me with that word “banished”?

  I had always dreamt of giving that speech. When Mike rehearsed those lines I caught myself mouthing along with him, repeating the word banished over and over. Sometimes I said the word at night in my bed, stressing different syllables.

  Banish-ed

  Ban-is-hed

  Bani-shed

  Luckily I had something to take my mind off all the perceived injustice. After class one day I got a call from that same agent I had met at ACTF, who said, “There’s going to be a Broadway musical based on Bollywood.”

  “Really? Who’s doing it?”

  “Andrew Lloyd Webber and A. R. Rahman. They’re doing a musical called Bombay Dreams, and I think you would be great as the lead.”

  C’mon, the lead?

  Well, they needed someone who was Indian and funny, so at the very least I had one out of two. But they also needed someone who could sing. (I wonder if they’d heard about a promising little band called the Prince and the Pauper?)

  The audition was in New York, so I took the seventeen-dollar Peter Pan bus from Philly to the Port Authority bus terminal, sitting right next to the driver because, according to urban legend, a guy once got decapitated in the back of a Peter Pan bus. The audition had two components: doing some scenes from the play, and then singing a song. Any song. I chose Billy Joel’s “She’s Got a Way,” because obviously my finger was on the pulse of modern pop culture.

  “She’s got a waaaaaaaaayyyyy.” I sang that first note, and immediately the casting director snapped her head up, looking at me.

  Is that a good sign or a bad sign? No idea. But I kept singing. I belted my little heart out, going all American Idol–like.

  Then I read the sides and did my funny Indian thing.

  “Who are you? How come I’ve never seen you before?” the casting director asked.

  “I’m Kunal Nayyar and I am a graduate student at Temple University.”

  “Come with me.”

  The casting director led me to her office and said she liked what she had heard, pumped me with self-confidence, and told me to come back in two weeks for callbacks for the lead role. The lead role! Go fuck yourself, Romeo.

  Back at Temple I spent the next two weeks practicing the main song in the show, blasting Bollywood lyrics at the top of my lungs. Somewhere in my mind I was having Bombay dreams of my own. I sang that song again and again, sixteen hours a day. I knew it cold. I can still sing it in my sleep. I sang that song so much that even my classmates caught themselves singing along—

  The journey home

  Is never too looooooong

  Once again I took the Peter Pan bus to New York. Once again I somehow avoided decapitation. I returned to the audition studio and I sang for all the big-shot music directors.

  “The journey home . . .”

  They listened with poker faces.

  “Is never too loooooooong.”

  Afterward they said, “Great song, great song. Can you do some sides now?”

  I did my lines and I killed them. The directors and producers were cracking up laughing. They gave me warm handshakes and said they would soon be in touch. I floated away from that audition. I took a walk through Central Park, enjoying the crisp February air and visualizing my future on Broadway. I sipped a hot chocolate and gazed at the skyline. This is the life I want. I’m going to be a star.

  I stared at the phone and waited for it to ring.

  It didn’t ring.

  I stared harder.

  It didn’t ri
ng.

  Finally the phone rang: I didn’t get the part.

  I would like to say, “You get used to these disappointments,” but that would be a lie. It always hurts. It feels the same whether you’re auditioning for a fifth-grade pageant or Cabaret in college or Romeo & Juliet in grad school or a Broadway show or a blockbuster Hollywood movie. The stage might be different, but if you care and you’ve invested all of yourself in the audition, the stakes are the same.

  Back at grad school, I had another chance to prove that I could be a dramatic leading man: our school would do The Seagull, a Chekhov play. One of my favorite plays of all time. I had known that this would be our next play and I was eyeing the lead role of Kostya. I also felt that after Romeo didn’t go my way, and after some of the other actors had already had the opportunity to play the lead in various plays, I would be asked to play Kostya. But nothing in life is ever handed to us, is it?

  “Kunal, you’re going to be Dr. Dorn,” my acting teacher said.

  “But we haven’t even had auditions!”

  “This is just the way I see it. You’ll be a great Dorn.”

  Dorn is yet another physical-comedy guy. Not the leading man.

  “Will you at least allow me to read for the part of Kostya?”

  “No. This is how I see it.”

  We eventually agreed on a compromise for the “audition”: as we read through the play as a group in the first act I would read the part of Dorn, and in the second act I would read for my coveted role of Kostya.

  So I read Dr. Dorn in the first act (and maybe sucked a bit on purpose), then did my best version of Kostya. When we finished, our acting teacher said that he wouldn’t reveal the casting just yet, because he had something to think about.

  The next day I raced to the theater to read the cast list:

  “Kunal Nayyar. Dorn.”

  How many times in my life would I need to prove myself? Once again I imagined these ridiculous scenarios, such as, maybe, the other guy made some side deal with our teacher.

  But then I did what I had gotten so used to doing. I worked. I was determined to prove to everyone—and myself—that I was the hardest-working one in the room. I’d come to see that my work was the only piece of the whole enterprise that I could control.

  In The Seagull, there’s a scene in the third act where Kostya begins to go crazy. He grabs onto the woman he loves and he says, “Nina, why? Nina, why?” He keeps saying Nina, why? Nina, why? Nina! Nina!

  Every night during that scene in the third act, I would go to the wings of the stage, and behind the big black curtain there was a little nook where I would sit. I would lean against the back walls of the theater. Inches from the stage, but just hidden enough so the audience couldn’t see me. And when Kostya said, “Nina, why?” I would say those words, too. I would mouth along, dreaming that one day, I too would get to say them. I can still hear them like music, like a violin.

  But the notes to that violin have changed. Nina, why? Over time I began to make sense out of the disappointment. For years I felt slighted and cheated when I was denied a shot at the “lead dramatic role.” I felt like I was just doing more of the same. Always comedy, comedy, comedy. Nina, why? But what if I wasn’t getting stereotyped? What if, instead, I was sharpening my comedic strengths? What if these teachers saw something in me, something that I was good at, and they wanted me to work harder and get better? And what if I was just being a sulky brat, and maybe those other guys were simply better than I in those particular parts?

  Nina, why? I’ll tell you why, Nina. Maybe my role as Benvolio wasn’t a waste. Maybe it taught me a new mannerism or a quirk or it improved some aspect of my timing. Maybe my time as Dorn, which I accepted so ungratefully, gave me the confidence to later add more texture to a character named, say, Rajesh Koothrappali. Listen up, Nina. This is important. If, in a parallel universe, I had been given the chance to play Romeo and Kostya, maybe, years later, agents wouldn’t have seen me in a comedic light, and I would never have gotten to play shy little nerd Raj in the not-so-little show The Big Bang Theory, and I wouldn’t be sitting here writing this book.

  I was reminded of something important that my father had taught me all those years ago: If it happens, good. If it doesn’t happen, very good.

  * * *

  I. Which was very brave of me, as I hate public bathrooms and only use them under extreme duress. I’ve just never understood the concept of people pooping next to each other.

  A Thought Recorded on an Aeroplane Cocktail Napkin

  Love’s Labour’s Lost

  WASHINGTON, D.C. A NEW CITY, a new apartment, and a new world. I was twenty-five and had just finished graduate school. I arrived in the capital with two suitcases stuffed with everything I owned.

  I had just been cast in an Indian version of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, helmed by legendary director Michael Kahn. For the non-theater-folk out there, to paraphrase Ron Burgundy, Michael Kahn “is a pretty big deal.” Was I the lead role? Nope. Supporting? Nope. I didn’t have any lines, I was an understudy, and my itty-bitty role as a “minion” just meant, basically, that my only job was to carry mango milk shakes across the stage without spilling them. The play was crap. (Sorry, Michael.) It was so bad, and I felt bad for the actors because everyone was trying so hard. My character only existed for “Indian authenticity.” It was borderline racist, even though I’m sure the intentions were pure enough. (It’s the equivalent of eating fried chicken with a black person and telling them how much you admire their culture because of their ability to use a deep fryer.) That being said, it was my first professional gig and I was getting paid to be onstage.

  The run of the show was mainly uneventful. Except for once when I spilled my mango milk shake onstage in the middle of a scene, and after the performance got yelled at backstage by one of the veteran actors: “Which one of you assholes spilled that milk shake?”

  “It was me,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You spilled a fucking milk shake in the middle of my scene!” he roared, and then just kept on yelling at me.

  I apologized, but I didn’t flinch, I didn’t cower, and I immediately went into the assistant director’s office and said, “If he talks to me that way again, ever, there will be a big problem.”

  One night, fifteen minutes before curtain, the actor for whom I was understudying had not shown up.

  “Kunal, start warming up, you’re going to have to go on,” the assistant director said to me.

  Woo-hoo! My moment to shine! The rest of the cast cheered me on. This is one of the wonderful things about the theater: people support each other. Even though we build walls to steel ourselves against rejection, there’s something that kicks in when an actor is about to do something big and needs support. The entire cast rallied around me.

  “I’m so excited for you!”

  “You’ll do great, Kunal!”

  They were all so wonderful. I got into my costume and I warmed up for my professional acting debut.

  It’s time.

  It wasn’t time.

  Just before the curtain was about to rise, the actor phoned to say that he would be there in ten minutes. He had gotten stuck on an underground train. They actually delayed the start of the play to give him time to get to the theater and get into costume. My costume. The one that I had just put on; the one that I had to take off and give back to him. My moment would have to wait.

  This play did, however, have one amazing perk. It was selected to represent America at the World Shakespeare Festival in StratfordUpon-Avon, England, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. It felt so good to return to England.I For the first time in years I went to a country where I actually had a valid passport. For once, I breezed through immigration. I saw all of my American castmates in line and gave them the finger.

  Since I didn’t have shit to do in the play (I’d long since mastered the fine art of carrying a mango milk shake without spilling it), I spent most of my time geeking out in the
actual Royal Shakespeare Theatre, soaking in the historic sites, and mingling with the actors from other countries. Every night, after the shows were done, performers from all over the world gathered for pints at the local pub called the Black Swan. It was amazing meeting so many artists from various walks of life. I was particularly moved by a large group of street kids from Brazil who performed The Two Gentlemen of Verona in Portuguese, as a musical. They had no formal training, but when I watched them perform the play it was mesmerizing. There was no fear in their performance; it came straight from the heart. No amount of training can teach you how to be in touch with what’s going on inside you. They were pure love when they performed. Every night they came to the pub with their bongos and drums and basically started one big dance party. I remember watching this one beautiful Brazilian woman with dark eyes, a shy smile. She wore the same dress every night because it was probably the only dress she owned. And when she danced she could make the entire world stand still.

  “Kiss her,” said one of the few Brazilian guys who spoke English.

  “What?”

  “Kiss her! In Brazilian culture, if you don’t kiss the girl in the first ten minutes of meeting her, she’ll think you’re rude.” So I mustered up the courage to make the first move, only I guess I waited a little too long, because eleven minutes later, as I prepared to walk over, she was kissing someone else.

  On one of our final days in England, during a lull between performances, I relaxed in a greenroom that adjoined both the Swan Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It was a common room designed for actors from both theaters to have a place to eat, drink, relax, and watch TV. I sipped on a cup of coffee and watched rugby, a sport I knew very little about.

  “What’s the score?” asked an actor next to me, a bald guy with a booming, magical voice.

  I looked up at this bald man with the beautiful voice and I did a double take. It was Sir Patrick Stewart. Patrick. Fucking. Stewart. Professor Jean-Luc X Picard was sitting next to me in the greenroom, dressed as Prospero for The Tempest, and he wanted to know the score.