Kumali Nanjiani says Hollywood is now scared of casting non-white actors as bad ... trends now
Chippendales actor Kumali Nanjiani said Hollywood is afraid of casting non-white actors as villains, overcorrecting in an effort to appear woke.
Nanjiani, 44, was excited to play the villainous role of strip club owner Somen 'Steve' Banerjee in Hulu's Welcome to Chippendales as he says audiences will rarely see a non-white villain anymore.
'I’ve never gotten to play an arc like this,' the Pakistani American actor said of the role to Esquire. 'By far the most layered, complex, complicated person I've ever played.
'I want to play more bad guys.'
The Silicon Valley actor said he doesn't believe he would have given the chance to play Steve Banerjee if it wasn't based on a true story, suggesting the role would have gone to a white actor.
'I think that Hollywood now – even though they’re trying to be more diverse – is still weird,' he told the magazine. He went on to say that Hollywood executives are questioning what message is being sent if a non-white actor plays a bad guy, but the actor believes that is 'as limiting as anything else.'
Kumali Nanjiani, 44, 'wants to play more bad guys' after performing as strip club owner Somen 'Steve' Banerjee in Hulu's Welcome to Chippendales. 'I’ve never gotten to play an arc like this...By far the most layered, complex, complicated person I've ever played,' he said
Nanjiani, who has played a wide variety of roles, including a superhero in Marvel's Eternals, wants to keep his acting portfolio wide open, much like actor Sebastian Stan, who has played roles in the Marvel Universe as well as a cannibal in the 2022 movie Fresh.
'He does these big Marvel movies, and then he’ll play a psychopath,' he said of the Romanian American actor. 'I was told that’s going to be hard because people don’t want to cast non-white people as bad guys.'
Since the 2000s, moviegoers have seen a lot more white actors playing villains on their screens, from Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008) to Tom Hiddleston as Loki in the Marvel Universe (2011-2021).
Before then, villain roles often went to people of color and several roles portrayed Arabs as terrorists. Art Malik, a Pakistani-British actor, famously played Salim Abu Aziz in the 1994 film True Lies, which follows Arnold Schwarzenegger's character tracking down nuclear missiles from Malik's.
The $100million film, which was written by Titanic's James Cameron, sees Malik play the main antagonist as a henchman.
Another blockbuster, Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, also features a non-white villain - Marsellus Wallace, played by Ving Rhames. Rhames' character is a gang leader whose life intertwines with two mob hitmen, a boxer,
