About a month after the Namesake audition, I went into a recording studio in LA for some ADR (automated dialogue replacement, or dubbing) on Son of the Mask. ADR is a common process. Sometimes during a shoot, there’s a little background noise over a few lines from a truck going by, or an airplane overhead, something that drowns out the audio. So, during postproduction, you stand in front of a fancy microphone and dub whatever lines they have laid out on a music stand in front of you.
The email about Son of the Mask ADR said only three lines needed to be fixed, and that it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes. When I got to the studio, the sound engineer and Original Ideas McGee were there waiting, as expected. Next to them were a couple of guys in suits also waiting, as… well, that was unexpected. These turned out to be studio executives on the project. Instead of one sheet of paper with three lines of ADR, they had placed the entire hundred-and-twenty-one-page script on the music stand. Something was up.
I exchanged fake pleasantries with everyone about how excited we all were about this hilarious project (one of the worst movies I’ve ever done), how much fun we had in Sydney (truly hated it), and how cool it was to see each other again (I never wanted to see their faces after this was over). Then they dropped it. “Hey man, so as we were editing, we realized your character didn’t really have as pronounced of an accent as we thought, so we need to take a couple of hours and dub all your lines in a really thick Indian accent.”
This was a shakedown. The studio executives were there to try to intimidate me. By this point in my short career, I knew how to handle hubristic tiny-dicked guys like this. “That’s hilarious!” I said with an enthusiastic smile. “You really didn’t think the accent was thick enough? Well, I want the character to be as funny as possible, so let’s make it thicker!”
They seemed relieved that I was so agreeable. “The only thing is,” I said, “the email said this was just a twenty-minute session. I have three auditions today. Can you guys call my manager to set up a day when I have the time to be here for a few hours? I’m excited to come back.”
They bought it.
“Of course,” one of the suited guys said. “We’ll call over there right away.”
“Can’t wait!”
Randy Finn taught me in kindergarten that I could always outsmart a racist. The reality was, I didn’t have any other auditions that day. I had no other auditions all week. In fact, I never wanted to go on any auditions ever again because if this was the shit I still had to deal with after doing Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, then I was done with this industry.
* * *
I got in the car—by that point, my mom’s Chevy Cavalier… the Toyota with the salvage title had since died on the 405 Freeway—and called Spilo. I cursed and ranted the entire drive from the studio to his office, yelling about how I never wanted to work in this town ever again—this fucking town, filled with so many people who claim to be so politically progressive when in reality they’re just racist assholes.
“Calm down. You’re coming to my office?” Dan said.
“I am! I need to discuss this face-to-face!” I said, before continuing my profanity-laced rant about how I was going to leave entertainment forever. “I am smart! I have other interests! I did my own stunts! I can do anything else! Fuck Gita and Ravi!” Every grievance. On and on and on. I was losing it.
I got to my manager’s building, parked in a reserved space where the powerful owner of the company usually put his silly Lamborghini, and barged past the receptionist into Dan’s office. I gave zero fucks at this point. I continued my ranting for another ten minutes, covering every racist experience from Son of the Mask back to talking cats and dancing monkeys. I couldn’t take it anymore. I was finished with acting, and he needed to know it. I quit.
With that, I finally stopped to breathe.
“Are you done?” Dan chimed in.
“I don’t know! Why?!”
“Because Mira Nair just called. The other guy backed out. You got the lead in The Namesake.”
I started crying in his office. “Congratulations, man. Don’t worry about Son of the Mask. Fuck them. I’ll get you out of it. You’re about to work on your dream project with your dream director. You’re doing a Mira Nair film.”
1?In which I played an implied terrorist named Hadji (a word that refers to a Muslim who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca and is also used as a slur, depending on the intent and circumstance).
2?Thanks, White Nancy!
3?Jersey, baby!
4?Never mind. That doesn’t quite work.
5?Still not sure why they all have mustaches in these magazines, but I do think that’s kinda tite too. Gotta respect any mustache that comes close to looking like the Lorax’s.
6?To put that into perspective, after initially opening to poor box-office numbers, the movie grossed at least $30 million in its explosive first two years on DVD (so the current number is way, way more than $30 mil). And no, we don’t get any of that big money—those are the fairly negotiated breaks, kids!
7?Then nonexistent.
8?None, it’s real fire! I told you I do my own stunts, y’all.
9?Where I met Billy Rosenberg, who introduced me to Jon and Hayden.
10?AKA: Because our writing is subpar.
11?Damn, Sunny was good!
12?Yes.
CHAPTER ELEVEN NO PRIOR EXPERIENCE
The empowerment I felt at the audition just from something as innocuous as Mira Nair having an Indian American assistant really paled in comparison to what it was like on the set of The Namesake itself. It was so totally different from any other project I’d had the chance to work on. For starters, I hadn’t had the opportunity to be part of a creative team that paid such attention to detail. Every word of the script and each frame of each scene seemed stealthily commissioned. With a nominal budget, equally financed by American, Indian, and Japanese companies, the production wasn’t fancy. There were no big trailers or huge setups. Our dressing rooms were in a honey wagon: one long eighteen-wheeler subdivided into ten small, narrow spaces by thin, plastic retractable accordion blinds. Each narrow area had enough space for a small bench and one tiny toilet that doubled as a chair, but it was below a rod for hanging clothes, so you couldn’t actually sit on it. Didn’t matter. It was all you needed to prepare for each day’s scene work. Besides, Mira didn’t have a room like this. She didn’t even use a chair. On set, she just sat on a wooden box covered with a thin cushion.