“I never consciously got into comedy. It was sort of one of those things where I was a theater student, I was acting, I was doing comedy, I was doing dramatic stuff, so it’s been something that I’ve always done and enjoyed doing and had an instinct to be relatively good at.”

I mean, but obviously, in people’s eyes, it still – it can still link Islam to terrorism. I mean, why does it make a difference that they’re white?

Because to Americans, Chechnya might as well be a suburb of Narnia.

When you’re brown and Indian, you get offered a lot of doctor roles.

I’m not really a food connoisseur.

Re-colonizing it and sort of reverse-colonizing it to the point that today the national dish of Great Britain is Chicken Tikka Masala.

I thought [when I was 16] my days were just going to be spent hanging out on a beach and my girlfriend was going to be Miss Teen USA and my best friend will be a dolphin.

I know the Gospel according to Mark better than I know any sura in the Quran.

In America, you have this kind of individualism and in the West, essentially, you have this individualism – this idea of my own personal fulfillment.

You can get samosas in any pub in England today, pretty much. So, “Gunga Din” has come back.

I think that hijacks the spirituality and beauty that exists within Islam. I believe in allowing Islam to be seen in context and in its entirety and being judged on what it really is, not what you think it is.

Bradford specifically there were a lot of Pakistanis there. Even today it has a very large Pakistani population.It was something that I experienced

If people invited Muslims into their home every week by way of a TV show would go a long way to making people feel comfortable with Muslims and countering misconceptions about who we are. Plus, of course, that will make it easier for us to impose sharia law across America.

Samantha Bee said to me when I first started on the “Daily Show”, she was like no – there is no – the only way you’ll learn this job is by doing this job.

For anybody who’s ever been on the other end of, like, racial violence logic is not something that can be used.

In America, people think being South Asian is still kind of exotic. When you go outside New York and Chicago and L.A., there are people who have never tried Indian food… they’ve never even tasted it!

I was born in India – but never really lived there.

My family was very supportive of my acting.

Now, I take my fees in cash, for acting, and keep the distribution thing separate.

Earlier, I used to charge territories instead of my fees as an actor, but I realised it was better to keep the two apart.

I wanted to be more hands on. Otherwise, every time you finish acting in a movie you have to almost go and beg people for the next job.

Modelling is only about the look. In acting, it’s the feel that matters.

Everything about acting drives me and gives me the need to really try it. It’s an evolution – doing the same thing for 12 years is kind of a chunk.

For modelling, you have to be such a strong person in a way – or seen to be a strong person, do you know what I mean? But in acting you have to get in touch with all the vulnerability that you carry.

And what I love is that it’s such a creative process, with a bunch of people, and I wanted that more, which is how the acting thing came about.