Nithya Raman was working the beer taps, refilling the glasses of tipsy patrons during a campaign stop at Tom Bergin’s Irish pub in the Fairfax District.
After topping off a final glass, she made a beeline for the man sitting in the corner, quietly nursing his Guinness. He has no official role in Raman’s campaign for Los Angeles mayor, but he’s frequently by her side on the campaign trail, as he was this St. Patrick’s Day.
His name is Vali Chandrasekaran, and if Raman edges out incumbent Karen Bass in the Nov. 3 mayoral election, he will be the first to be what one might call the “first gentleman” of Los Angeles.
“He loves the city more than me,” Raman said the other day (“as much,” campaign aide Tessa Wick quickly interjected).
Chandrasekaran, 45, has good reason to love Los Angeles. The son of Indian immigrants to America who grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, he has become a successful writer and producer, working on hit shows like “Modern Family” and “30 Rock.”
L.A. was always where Chandrasekaran wanted to be, he said, a place where your pedigree doesn’t matter as long as you are talented.
“If you just make something good, nobody cares what you did before that,” he said. “It is so rad to me.”
Like many before him, Chandrasekaran said he moved to Los Angeles for a better life and to realize his lifelong dream of working in the entertainment industry. With that industry now going through turbulent changes, and Los Angeles challenged by issues including affordability, homelessness and a crumbling infrastructure, he worries that future generations may no longer be drawn here.
“If my kids didn’t want to live here because they thought somewhere else was a better place to make stuff, a cooler place to make stuff, that would break my heart. I want them to live their own lives, but I want L.A. to be the place that it was to me in their heads,” he said.
Chandrasekaran and Raman, who live with their twin 10-year-old son and daughter in Silver Lake, often discuss politics and Hollywood. But he admits that he’s not a policy wonk like his wife, who was first elected to the L.A. City Council in 2020.
When Raman asks him what can be done to keep the entertainment industry centered in Los Angeles, Chandrasekaran said he often steers her to the leaders of his union, the Writers Guild of America West.
“For like 18 years I made a living working in Los Angeles, shooting in Los Angeles, raising my family in Los Angeles, and very recently I’ve had to start leaving town for production,” he said. “My kids are young. Leaving town for that amount of time, it stinks.”
Raman says that her husband’s work in Hollywood brings the issue home for her, though she has been critiqued by the Bass campaign for recusing herself from several Hollywood-related City Council votes due to potential conflicts of interest because of her marriage to Chandrasekaran.
“His understanding of the crisis has made it so vivid for me in a way that is unignorable,” she said. “He’s had friends who don’t work anymore. He’s had so many people he knows in the industry leave the city because of how irregular work has become.”
Chandrasekaran believes his occupation would lead Raman to care even more about Hollywood than past mayors.
“Selfishly, I would hope so,” he said. “This is a thing that comes up all the time in our house.”
From college humorist to ’30 Rock’ writer
Chandrasekaran and Raman met in 1999, when they were both undergraduates at Harvard University. Chandrasekaran applied there because he read in a college guidebook that students who work at the Harvard Lampoon often go on to careers in Hollywood.
As part of a long-standing Lampoon prank, he once set out to break into the office of the rival Harvard Crimson to steal the president’s chair. He broke into a different office by mistake, setting off an alarm and alerting the Cambridge Police Department, who arrested him.
“I’m a good boy,” Chandrasekaran said. “I was mortified.”
Chandrasekaran and Raman broke up in college, but the pair got together again after graduation and married in 2010.
Degree in hand, Chandrasekaran was hired as a consultant for Boston Consulting Group in Los Angeles and wrote spec scripts in his free time. That helped him get an agent and begin his career as a writer on “My Name is Earl.” He hasn’t looked back since.
“He loves people. He’s curious. If you drop him off at a party he’ll be talking to somebody finding out their life story — in a real way,” said Steve Hely, another TV writer who worked with Chandrasekaran on the Harvard Lampoon and on Tiny Fey’s “30 Rock,” a job that required them to live in New York City.
Chandrasekaran and Hely co-wrote the 2008 book, “The Ridiculous Race: 26,000 Miles, 2 Guides, 1 Globe, No Airplanes,” about each of them trekking around the world in opposite directions without using airplanes to see who could make it back to Los Angeles first. The prize? Bragging rights and a bottle of Scotch.
“He’s very genuine and good-hearted,” Hely said. “Vali is also a great booster of L.A.”
‘He takes away my blinders’
Despite his deep passion, Chandrasekaran doesn’t necessarily see himself taking any sort of leading role on Hollywood if Raman were to be elected.
“I’ve never necessarily heard him advise her. It’s more of a support thing,” said Tom Ceraulo, a friend of Chandrasekaran and Raman who is a former script coordinator for “30 Rock.”
But Raman said that Chandrasekaran serves an important advisory role for her.
“My husband is also just a really good gut check for me of what matters to the people of Los Angeles versus what matters in the hallways of power,” she said. “He takes away my blinders and reminds me what the city is looking for.”
Chandrasekaran said he doesn’t solicit donations for Raman, and has no official role on her campaign. But he’ll offer Raman a ride to a campaign event across town so they can spend time together, or he’ll get snacks or pizza for the campaign team. He also has the role of walking the kids to their school in Silver Lake every morning.
Still, Chandrasekaran’s industry connections are key to her campaign, especially when it comes to raising money for her council and mayoral bids.
Raman’s roster of campaign donors reads like a who’s who of comedy writers — and Harvard Lampoon alumni, including “Saturday Night Live” cast member Colin Jost and “Detroiters” co-creator Zach Kanin.
Tina Fey, Chandrasekaran’s boss on two shows, gave the maximum $1,800 to Raman’s primary campaign.
Hely also hosted a fundraiser for Raman’s mayoral campaign with a mix of Hollywood and non-Hollywood people in attendance.
Chandrasekaran stresses that it’s just the world he and his wife live in now and that the contributions have less to do with him than they do with Raman’s vision of Los Angeles.
His main role, he insists, is that of supportive, and sometimes overwhelmed co-parent and husband.
He can’t, for example, watch his wife when she debates.
It’s like being the spouse of a boxer and watching them in the ring — or, he said, it reminds him of Brad Pitt’s character, Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane, in the movie “Moneyball,” who can’t bring himself to watch his team’s games and so retreats to the gym to exercise, occasionally turning the television on and off.
“I’ve never related to a person more. You want to know, but, I can’t do anything about it,” he said.
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