Yes, My Accent Is Real

by Kunal Nayyar

  The preliminary audition was at 11 a.m. I wore brown corduroy pants, a checkered shirt buttoned to the top, and a Caltech hat. (In the pilot, if you remember, Raj is wearing a hat.) Here’s how the process works: At the preliminary audition, you perform for the casting director, who in turn either dismisses you or gives you “acting notes”—things they’d like to see you do differently for the second round. The second round (if you make it) is where you get to audition for the actual producers. During the first round, though, the casting director’s notes typically involve your delivery and motivation—you know—acting shit.

  “Kunal, can you unbutton the top button of your shirt?” she asked.

  “Sure, no problem.”

  And those were my notes. A few minutes later the casting director took two of us aside. “Can you guys come back at three p.m. for round two?” She sent everyone else home, which, frankly, is an actor’s dream—to have almost every other competitor sent home after the first round.

  I had a few hours to kill and I was feeling confident, so I went outside and ate a bacon cheeseburger (so of course I thought of Allison the Lesbian). I wore a napkin over my shirt, terrified that I would destroy my costume.

  I came back at two thirty—thirty minutes early—and was the first person back. As I sat in the hallway the casting director and the producers walked past me and I made a silly joke, something like, “I had a cheeseburger for lunch so please excuse my gas.”

  This made everyone crack up. I was trying to win them over even before my audition.

  “You are so funny!” the casting director said as she went into the room.

  Yes, I’m funny! When you’re an actor you hold on to every single word from a casting director, and you analyze and overanalyze everything they say—over and over and over again until you get the part, or more likely, you don’t.

  I was called into the room and it was time to audition for Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady, the creators of The Big Bang Theory. The truth is I still did not understand the gravitas of the situation. A more seasoned actor might have been psyching themselves out: Oh God, it’s Chuck Lorre! He’s created like six of the biggest sitcoms of all time! He’s a god in the television world! This is my big chance, don’t screw it up! To me, he was just another guy I wanted to make laugh.

  Chuck has a maniacal laugh, a cackle that’s almost a cough. It’s infectious to hear that laugh. It’s a laugh that makes you want to laugh along with it. So when he started laughing at my audition it gave me more and more confidence and I began to take over the room. It was another ssssssssssss moment, but this time it was real life.

  I could tell that the audition had gone well. I went home, showered, and headed to my usual shift at the raw food restaurant, waiting tables and bullshitting with Diego and Zane. The next day once again I went to work for my usual shift . . . and then saw I had four missed calls.

  “Kunal, they want to screen-test you,” said Suzanne.

  “What?”

  “They want to test you. Tomorrow.”

  In the pilot world, a screen test is the final step to securing the role. To play Dave, I would have to audition for the big cheeses at Warner Bros. and CBS.

  I finished my shift at the restaurant—at least I think I did. I don’t remember anything else about that evening, I was walking around in a daze. That night I couldn’t sleep. Both excited and nervous. This was real.

  The next morning, once again, I treated myself to a rental car from Enterprise. This was a big moment, and I didn’t want to take my chances on the public transportation system. They happened to be out of economy cars that day, so instead they upgraded me, for free, to a white convertible Toyota Solara. What a good start to the day! On the way I opened the roof and blasted nineties hip-hop, feeling the wind in my hair and the California sun on my face. It was Broadway, and Central Park, and daydreaming all over again. I drove through the gate at CBS Studios feeling like a champ.

  The final audition was in a “black box” type of theater. It looked exactly like all the theaters I had auditioned in before, and so it felt oddly comfortable. This was auditioning for ACTF. This was auditioning for grad school. I have been here before.

  I stood on that stage and knew that the most powerful people in the studio were watching me, so I decided I would break the ice with a stupid joke.

  “Hello, I am Kunal. Thank you for allowing me to audition for Two and a Half Men.”

  Laughter from the faceless audience.

  “No, wait, that’s not right,” I continued. “What Chuck Lorre show is this? Just too many to choose from.”

  Before I started, I said to the casting director, in front of the entire audience, “Listen, I’m saying these lines in a room full of very important people, so it’s important to me that you don’t crack up laughing in the middle of my audition. Please keep it together.”

  She starts laughing and the faceless audience does, too.

  At that moment I’m just at a party, telling jokes to my friends, entertaining the room.

  Then I deliver my audition. More laughter, and some more, and maybe a little more . . .

  After it was over, driving back to Enterprise in that white convertible, I said to myself, Kunal, no matter what happened, you did a really good job, you left your heart on the line, and I’m proud of you. Even if you don’t get the job, I’m proud of you.

  And then the phone didn’t ring.

  It didn’t ring that night.

  It didn’t ring the next day.

  It didn’t ring the third day.

  It didn’t ring the fourth day.

  Typically, the way this whole thing works is that you find out if you get the role within five days of an audition. This is contractually required. On day five, if the studio needs more time, they have to officially ask your agent if they can “extend the waiting period.”

  So on day five—the day that I should get a yes or no—they asked to extend the waiting period.

  I had no leverage. After huddling with my manager and agent, we agreed to extend the waiting period for another five days.

  No call on day six.

  No call on day seven.

  Nor on day eight.

  And not on day nine.

  I’m hapless, I’m sleepless, I’m waiting, I’m hanging on by a thread. Hoping for a miracle. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. You get the picture.

  Finally, on day ten, I got the long-awaited call from my agent.

  But it wasn’t that call.

  “Kunal, they want to extend another five days.”

  Kill me. But what could I do? At that point I had become a zombie. I was still working at the raw food restaurant, but I couldn’t focus on the food or Diego or Zane or Zane’s yellow Lamborghini. I would take the bus to work, arrive for my shift, and not even remember how I got there.

  We agreed to extend another five days—what choice did we have?

  No call on day eleven.

  No call on day twelve.

  No call on day thirteen.

  No call on day fourteen.

  Finally, on day fifteen, I got the call from my agent.

  But it was not that call.

  “They want to extend for another five days.”

  “No,” I said. I had had enough. “I demand an answer. This is torture.”

  “Kunal. We have to.”

  “If they give me the role they give me the role, but if not, I’m out.”

  “Trust me,” my agent said.

  “No. No more.” I was adamant.

  “Okay, how about this. I’ll tell them that we can extend the waiting period one last time, five more days, and that’s it.”

  I let out a long, deep sigh.

  “One last time,” I agreed.

  No call on day sixteen.

  No calls on days seventeen, eighteen, or nineteen.

  And still nothing on day twenty.

  It was time to call the studio and tell them that we would not extend anymore.

 
“Give us a couple more hours, and we’ll call you back,” the studio promised her.

  Then, finally, I got the call.

  It was that call.

  I was going to play Dave on The Big Bang Theory. Only now he was going to be called Raj Koothrappali.

  It’s funny how it all worked out. The beginning was quick as lightning—I auditioned for an agent on Thursday, signed with the agent on Friday, auditioned for Big Bang on Monday, had a callback on Wednesday—and then, toward the end, it all came to a soul-crushing halt. One thing I learned, though, is that whenever you go into auditions or interviews, the judge is on your side. They want you to succeed. Think about it. Let’s say you’re going to interview for a job. The hiring manager wants to fill that job so she can recruit a kick-ass employee and grow her team. And she wants that employee to be you. She’s hoping that you’ll blow her mind. As actors, or as job seekers, we walk into the room and we worry that they’re sniffing for weakness. The truth is that they’re already on your side, because once they find someone they want, they can call it a day and go home.

  Luck. People always say to me. You got lucky with your first audition. What do I say to them? How can I explain the journey? Leaving everyone and everything I knew in Delhi, cleaning toilets in Portland, making it through graduate school in Philadelphia, spilling milk shakes in D.C., auditioning in the Apple Store in New York City, stacking books every night, and riding the bus across LA. All the heartache, all those years, all the winning and losing and winning again. Every person has a different journey. But no one has an easy one. Luck.

  After I received the good news I still had a few shifts to finish at Gerardo’s. I informed everyone that I would soon be leaving.

  On my final night at the restaurant, Zane came in wearing his usual suit and his usual sunglasses. “I have a present for you,” he said, tossing me a box.

  I opened it. Inside was a miniature yellow Lamborghini. On the bottom of the box he wrote, “Till you get your own.”

  * * *

  I. It was a little weird seeing so much skin, even in a raw food restaurant.

  II. Okay, I’d had one scene on NCIS playing an Iranian terrorist with a crooked mustache. Indian. Iranian. We all look the same.

  James Bond and the Mouse

  ONE OF MY FATHER’S FANTASIES is that he is an international superspy who specializes in outdoor survival. He has never openly confessed this to me, but his actions scream “superspy plus mountain man survivalist.”

  For example, every time he comes to Los Angeles to visit, his first request is to shop at an outdoors store. This trip, which requires a three-hour drive to the suburbs, ends up being a whole-day affair. We wake up early enough to have some tea and biscuits and to drop my mother off at TargetI and we set off to the wilderness that is the suburbs. Along the way I can feel the excitement building in my father. It is the same excitement he probably sensed in me as a child when he took me to the toy store, or for ice cream, or to play badminton.

  It gives me immense pride to be able to do this for my father. After a lifetime of being taken care of, it really is nice to be the one taking care. Halfway through the drive, he is asleep. I, too, am trying to stay awake. I blast some Bollywood hits and focus hard on the road ahead. My mind is drifting, and with every floating leaf, every passing cloud, I reminisce about my father, about this man asleep by my side, the man who shaped my very being, and his childlike enthusiasm for our trip to the outdoors store.

  My father always collected guns. We grew up in a household with guns. When I was seven I was called into the gun room and taught how to clean guns. As I got older I was taught gun safety. How to load and unload a gun and, most important, how to make sure the safety catch was always on. The gun room smelled like gunpowder and oil. It was a room with thick steel cabinets. It felt like a bank vault. And it was cold, always cold. But it felt secure. Like if shit went down, this gun room would protect us. It had a personality of its own. It was RoboCop.

  One day when I was ten my mother had to go out of town for some work. When Mom was out of town, my brother and I would sleep in my parents’ room on the floor. This was mainly to cut down on the cost of running two ACs in the house. The summers in New Delhi were so hot that we needed to run the AC twenty-four hours a day. Obviously all of our neighbors were also doing the same thing, which would lead the electricity circuit breaker for our area to overheat and basically blow up. This meant that depending on what street you lived on, you would lose power for three hours a day between certain hours in order to protect the breaker. Our street was selected for 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., the exact hours when we would be trying to go to sleep. Already hot and bothered, Dad was in a real huff on this particular night. We were on the floor in his room, wiggling around, frustrated by the sauna in which we were stuffed, waiting for the AC to come back to life. I heard my father tossing and turning, occasionally releasing an audible expletive. I’ve always been a light sleeper, and I could tell that he was getting more and more agitated. His expletives were getting louder and he seemed to be really angry.

  “Goddammit, I’ve had enough,” he said, and suddenly ripped himself out of bed.

  I jumped out of bed, too. “Papa, what happened?”

  “Beta [son], there is a stupid mouse running up and down and he just got on the bed and ran all over my face! I’m going to kill that asshole once and for all. Go get my rifle.”

  He threw me the keys to the gun room, and a rush of excitement ran over me. I always relished a meeting with RoboCop. I was surprised he asked me and not my older brother, but I quickly realized it was because my brother was asleep and snoring. Fat-ass. I ran to the gun room, opened the door, and took a deep breath as the odor of gun oil and gunpowder filled my lungs. I felt alive, like a raging bull. I was ten, high on some mix of toxins, I had a rifle in my hand, and I was about to watch the massacre of a mouse. Best. Night. Ever. Upon returning to the bedroom, I found my brother was awake and shining a flashlight under the bed.

  “Is the safety on?” Dad asked.

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “Good boy, now stand behind your brother. Keep an eye on the mouse; when I shoot it you have to keep track of the splattered blood.”

  YYYYEEEEEESSSS, I heard in my head. I was swimming with adrenaline. Dad effortlessly cocked the gun and took aim. There was silence. Everything suddenly went still. My brother was calm as a horse, steady hands as he held that flashlight directly at the mouse. He’s always been a rock under pressure, I envy him for that. THWACK! THWACK! THWACK! Three shots rang out.II

  “Did you see the blood, Kunal?”

  “No, Dad, I didn’t see anything.”

  “Can you boys see the mouse?”

  “No, Dad,” we replied.

  There was no blood. There was no mouse. We damn near turned that entire bed upside down to find the remains of that mouse. But nothing. Not even a blemish of blood on the wall. I mean, three bullet holes in the wall, sure, but a dead mouse? Nope. Where could it have gone? Had this little mouse outplayed the massive aliens with guns and lived to see another day? Was it all a figment of our imagination? Had the heat driven us mad? No one could figure it out.

  What we did know is that there was one bullet left in the magazine. Now, Dad didn’t want to leave a loaded rifle in the house, and we could not unload it because it was already in the slot. The only other option was to shoot out the remaining bullet. So Dad took the gun into the bathroom and shot into the clothes basket. Not a bucket of water, or into some foam, or the sky, but into a pile of dirty laundry.

  When Mom came home the next day she had a lot of questions. We mainly hid from her, and when she asked us why there were bullet holes in all her clothes we played dumb and said things like “Hungry moths, probably.” We never told her the truth. Maybe my father confessed. He was never one to stare death in the eye, and telling the truth was much easier than facing Medusa’s wrath. Maybe when she reads this book it will suddenly all make sense. I sometimes wonder what happened to
that mouse. I imagine him sitting on the beach somewhere, in a hula skirt, smoking a cigar, drinking a Corona, reminiscing like me.

  Dad has just woken up. We are close and he can probably smell the outdoors store from three miles away. A sense of smell is a wonderful thing to have. Every shop has a smell. Especially the ones we love. Toys “R” Us always smells like flowers and plastic, McDonald’s always smells like french fries, and outdoors stores always smell like freedom. I never asked Dad what outdoors stores smelled like, but I’m pretty sure that’s the way they smelled to him. We walk into the mega-complex of everything outdoorsy and are completely overcome by the sheer size of this place. Though we have been here before, it always feels like we’re arriving for the first time.

  When I was growing up in India we didn’t have anything like “superstores.” Everything was mom-and-pop owned. Sure, things are changing now, we have huge malls and such, but for someone from anywhere outside America to walk into a place like this is jaw-dropping. America does truly grasp the concept of overabundance. We grab a shopping cart and begin to head down the aisles one by one. Dad is giddy. He is going through all the aisles with an air of pride about mankind. He is proud of the designs and the research and labor that have gone into creating these products that help us brave the elements.

  He grabs a headlamp and tries it on. He’s always buying headlamps. I don’t understand why. We make fun of him for it and he’s oddly quiet when we do. Maybe he really does use them. Maybe when there is load shedding on our street he secretly goes out and helps all the neighbors turn on their generators. Maybe he is “Super Headlamp Man,” protector of all when darkness falls over the neighborhood.

  We continue through the metropolis, lamp still on his head, when we land at the outerwear section. This, to my father, is Mecca. My father worked in the garment trade at one point, and he is always in awe of the linings to be found in high-tech outerwear. It’s never cold enough in New Delhi to wear any of these things, but still he’s touching all of them, letting out oohs and aahs with every caress of stitching. He begins to pull them off the rack and try them on, inspecting every pocket as he does. Just a tip: the more pockets the better. I think I once bought him a jacket with forty-seven pockets. Really.