For most of his career, Kumail Nanjiani has been asked to play the same type of brash nerd character that he perfected over six seasons on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Then, a few years back, everything changed.
The Pakistani-American comedian transformed his body to appear in the Marvel movie Eternals and ever since, strange new doors have opened for him in Hollywood. One of those unexpected opportunities came when Natasha Lyonne reached out to him to play the bleach-blonde-haired, heavily tattooed Florida panhandle cop named Gator Joe on this week’s episode of her Peacock hit Poker Face. At first, he thought she was joking.
In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Nanjiani talks about how he nailed the character’s very specific Southern accent only days before they started filming. Then, he looks back at the earlier part of his career, including how close he came to playing Abed on Community, what he learned about “amoral” tech giants like Elon Musk through Silicon Valley, and the deeply rewarding experience of bringing his real-life story to the screen in The Big Sick. And he also discusses his long-awaited return to stand-up comedy with his first special in 12 years set to hit Hulu later this year.
When Lyonne randomly texted Nanjiani to ask if he wanted to guest star on this season of Poker Face, he thought to himself, “How long can I wait and not seem desperate?” He ended up saying yes “immediately” and only then received the script for the fourth episode in which he plays a character unlike anything he had ever tackled before. “Nobody’s ever thought of me for something like this,” he recalls thinking. He told the show’s co-creator and star, “I have no idea how I’m going to do this, but yes, I definitely want to do it.”
With just six days to go until shooting began, Nanjiani gave himself the challenge of mastering the character’s Florida panhandle accent. “To me, such an integral part of this character is the way he speaks,” he says. So he brought on a dialect coach and spent the next six days “annoying the f— out of” his wife, and frequent collaborator, Emily V. Gordon. “You can’t go 90 percent,” Nanjiani adds. “Because the one little moment where you sound like yourself, is the moment that completely makes everything else fall apart.”
Nanjiani describes Gator Joe, who has obvious allusions to Joe Exotic from Netflix’s Tiger King, as a “very flamboyant” influencer who “loves being famous.” The tattoos that covered his bare arms on set made him “feel and look like a completely different person.”
The Poker Face character is also completely different from the types of roles that were available to Nanjiani when he first made the transition from stand-up comedian to actor about 15 years ago.
“It was all nerds,” he tells me. “I was auditioning for a lot of nerds, or a lot of people who were socially awkward and not good with girls or the tech guy. And listen, I have no illusions about what I am, so I did a lot of those roles. And obviously, and then I ended up playing a nerd on Silicon Valley, which is one of the things I’m proudest of in my entire career.”
That show, which ran from 2014-2019 on HBO, was a scathing satire on the same tech oligarchs who have now become major players in the U.S. government under Donald Trump. That includes Elon Musk, who Nanjiani knows used to watch the show because he was tweeting about it long before he took over Twitter and renamed it X.
“I got to meet a lot of tech people and immediately all of us got very scared because we were like, tech is so powerful and these people are completely unconcerned with the morality of it,” Nanjiani recalls. “We would go to all these big companies and meet people, and they’d show us the new secret tech they were working on because they loved the show. And we were all like, yeah, but what about the ethical implication of this? And they were shocked to be asked.”
The industry leaders they met thought technology exists separately from morality. “And I don’t think that’s true,” Nanjiani says. “I think you’re shirking responsibility.”
The joke on Silicon Valley was always that the tech companies thought they were “making the world a better place.” But, “Is it really making the world a better place?” he asks. “Or is it making the world a worse place? And it’s clearly not something that they think about.”
Speaking directly to this “chaotic” moment in American politics, Nanjiani says that a lot of the blame can be placed directly at the feet of the people he met during that time. And while he’s hesitant to divulge anything about his personal interactions with Musk, he does imply that the Tesla founder was not thrilled about the storyline in which his character Dinesh dramatically crashed his beloved Tesla after putting it in “insane mode.”
“I know that these companies have a thing where, if you’re crashing their product, the policy is that they won’t support you or give you the free car, or whatever,” he says. “So I think that that was part of the equation back then.”
Especially after the success of Silicon Valley, it wasn’t easy for Nanjiani to be seen as anything other than a tech world nerd. “This industry really wants you to just repeat the things you’ve already done, because everybody’s pretty risk averse,” he says. “They’re like, let’s just have him do the exact thing that we know he can do.”
When the Marvel opportunity came around, he saw it as a chance to have people see him differently, which certainly happened when he transformed his body and posted a shirtless photo that briefly broke both the internet and his fans’ brains.
“Suddenly, I got offered a bunch of action stuff, because that was now the new box I was in,” he adds. “And that was frustrating for me for a long time. And then I was like, OK, I just have to show that I could do all kinds of different things.”
That’s why he’s so “grateful” to Lyonne and Poker Face creator Rian Johnson for letting him break out of yet another box. “You wouldn’t have thought that I could play Florida cop influencer with tattoos and frosted mullet, but now you know!”
Listen to the episode now and follow The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts to be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.
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