Kumail Nanjiani: “I Was Told People Don’t Want to Cast Non-White Actors as Bad Guys”

I’m not surprised. Is anybody actually surprised?

If I were a movie exec, looking for maximal profit in my investment, there is absolutely no way that I would put a person of color in a role that could be taken in a negative light. No studio wants their movie to be part of a “cancel culture” narrative on Twitter, so they’re making the safest creative decisions possible.

In an interview with Esquire, comedian Kumail Nanjiani has confirmed what we’ve long suspected: Hollywood doesn’t want to cast non-white actors in antagonist roles.

“I think that Hollywood now – even though they’re trying to be more diverse – is still weird,” the actor says. The problem, Nanjiani wagers, is that good intentions can sometimes lead to misguided solutions: if the bad guy is a brown guy, what message is that sending? “And that’s just as limiting as anything else,” he says. “I want to play more bad guys.”

“I want to play more bad guys.” Nanjiani would like a career as varied as his Marvel stablemate Sebastian Stan, who can flit from superhero to serial killer (Nanjiani watched Fresh, in which Stan plays a charming, organ-harvesting cannibal). “He does these big Marvel movies, and then he’ll play a psychopath. I was told that’s going to be hard because people don’t want to cast non-white people as bad guys.”

Nanjiani can currently be seen playing Chippendales mastermind Steve Banerjee on TV. if “Welcome to Chippendales” were not based on a true story, Nanjiani believes that the role would have gone to a white actor.

After years of middle Eastern terrorists and foreigners with scary accents dominating the villain business at the movies, it seems as though studios have pivoted pretty hard in the opposite direction with mostly white American villains. It helps that with the war in Ukraine, scary-looking Eastern Europe actors will have a glorious amount of opportunities in the foreseeable future.

As mentioned, if I was a bottom-line-driven studio executive, or writer, I would do anything to avoid writing an evil role for a person of color. Many people have become too sensitive about race and the last thing you want is for your movie to be confronted by endless “racist” narratives. Rational thinking is sadly gone.

It’s a real shame though because now many POC characters you see on-screen feel all-too-basic with no humane flaws, always saying the right thing. It’s really making everything bland and predictable. Three-dimensional characters, written for POC, with serious flaws have become a rarity. That’s something “New Hollywood” is just too scared to do.