When you’re brown and Indian, you get offered a lot of doctor roles.
AASIF MANDVIWhen you’re brown and Indian, you get offered a lot of doctor roles.
AASIF MANDVIIt’s an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.
AASIF MANDVIWhen I was 11 my friend’s mom made a peanut butter sandwich. I ate the sandwich and was like, ‘I’m never eating anything else again.’ And I still eat peanut butter every day. I would put peanut butter on a steak.
AASIF MANDVII 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.
AASIF MANDVII grew up on American pop culture so everything that I fantasized about to get out of this sort of humdrum world of Bradford was about America. So when we decided to move there I was on the plane.
AASIF MANDVIPeople lament that there’s no roles being written for South Asian or Muslim characters. But their parents don’t want their children to go into the entertainment field. You don’t get it both ways.
AASIF MANDVIThe idea that I had anything to do with speaking about Islam or about the Muslim world was just absurd to my family. … I hadn’t been to the mosque in like 10 years.
AASIF MANDVIFrom my parent’s generation the idea was not that marriage was about some kind of idealized, romantic love. It was a partnership. It’s about creating family. It’s about creating offspring.
AASIF MANDVIYou do find a lot of your time in the West kind of searching for your place in the world – your voice, your identity, like, who am I? Like, what is my reason for being here, you know? And in that same way who am I to be partnered with, you know?
AASIF MANDVII think I discovered my first, you know, my first image of a naked woman was sort of sneaking a peek at one of those magazines that was in my dad’s store.
AASIF MANDVII think politicians and comedians have a lot in common. One is a group of approval-seeking narcissists who will say and do anything to be liked… and comedians are always talking about politics.
AASIF MANDVII 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.
AASIF MANDVII said we are Ghodratis and there’s nothing that Ghodratis like more than a bargain.
AASIF MANDVIIf you choose to be a Muslim then you believe that it is on some level wrong to show the image of the Prophet Muhammad.
AASIF MANDVIFor anybody who’s ever been on the other end of, like, racial violence logic is not something that can be used.
AASIF MANDVII know the Gospel according to Mark better than I know any sura in the Quran.
AASIF MANDVI