"So I come in when the shit has hit the fan," says Poorna Jagannathan.
The actor is back in Mumbai after three years. She was at Elco market’s pani puri stalls 45 minutes after exiting the international airport, and, a few days later, insists we meet there as well.
It is clear that Jagannathan, now based in Los Angeles, misses Mumbai (later, at Bagel Shop, two waiters come and tell her they miss her too). It has been a long road from pani puri marathons at Elco to champagne binges at the Emmys.
This Sunday, Jagannathan will enter season 2 of the critically-acclaimed HBO show Big Little Lies—my only current TV show, a harrowing mash-up of marriage, motherhood and a murder mystery. Now, if you have been reading Lounge, you already know episode 4 is the clincher in contemporary television. Vices are revealed, divorce papers arrive, girls fall in love with Hot Priests—basically, it is when the shit hits the fan. And this is where Jagannathan comes in, in the high-conflict episode 5. She stays on for the three episodes that conclude the show. It’s a pivotal role in a lineup that includes Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon.
Big Little Lies had race-blind casting for the role (this has happened to her a few times recently.) She can’t reveal any more than that she plays a character called Katie Richardson.In Better Call Saul, casting director Sharon Bialy was looking for a doctor who “didn’t look" like they spoke Spanish. They were out for a Californian blonde but the role went to Jagannathan instead. “Playing smart doctors is my bread and butter," says Jagannathan, laughing. “Oh, and weeping mothers." It was a weeping mother role that welcomed her back to America. Playing Safar Khan, Riz Ahmed’s mother in The Night Of, changed things dramatically. “When you are part of a really good show, no matter how small the part is, you see a career shift. I find it’s better to be a small part of a big project versus a big part of a mediocre project," she says.
I ask if playing the cotton kameez-clad, distraught Safar meant she was only offered sad-migrant roles after that. “A hundred per cent yes but I was able to be selective after Night Of…earlier, I had to take what was on my plate."
She tries to take roles that add different dimensions to how South Asian women are perceived. A recent project is the Hulu show Ramy, which explores the experiences of a millennial man practising Islam in America through its protagonist, stand-up comedian Ramy Youssef. He loves God and porn and white women; The New York Times calls it a “quietly revolutionary comedy". She plays one of Ramy’s love interests and was drawn to it because it explores female sexuality through its wide cast of Muslim women.
The daughter of an Indian diplomat, Jagannathan has lived around the world—Pakistan, Ireland, India, Brazil and Argentina—and been out of place in it. As an actor, then, getting out of the box has been an abiding mission. She moved to India from the US because she didn’t want to be stereotyped as the model minority—the doctor, the lawyer, the smart scientist who figures out how the robot works. But even after she got to India and did Delhi Belly (2011), her outlook and accent meant she was boxed. “We are all in boxes…it’s true for all minorities. And the South Asian box is a golden box…. I am sick of being so good all the time. I want to explore what the Delhi Belly writer Akshat Verma calls the jetsam and flotsam. What’s on the flip side?" she says.
You could be a drunk and irresponsible single mother, I suggest. “Yes, like a South Asian Fleabag!" she says, positively glowing at the idea.
The Big Little Lies experience was a masterclass in acting. “My acting has completely shifted since," she says. “It was unbelievable to see the process. I have never been around that before, where someone has completely crossed over to the other side." On the sets, Streep put her at ease, telling her how nervous she had been when her husband had invited Al Pacino home for lunch.
At 46, Jagannathan has spent some time thinking about age and the agency it brings. A former advertising professional, she began to think about acting only at 30 and got her first role at 34. The key is to start producing, she says, citing Kidman and Witherspoon, who are producing projects with women at the centre, as examples. “Now I have everything available to me to write and produce and to be seen the way I want so if I am not doing it I can’t be bitching," she says. The balls are in the air. This trip, she’s meeting with producer Guneet Monga for one of the four pilot scripts she has in mind. “It’s in the next phase," she says.
I believe there will be a next phase. When I first met Jagannathan five years ago, she was the force behind Nirbhaya, a theatrical response to the 2012 gang rape of Jyoti Singh which toured the world from Mumbai to the Edinburgh festival to the Lynn Redgrave Theatre in New York. “We are always trying to pump new life into Nirbhaya," she says. There were no TV shows then. Now I hear there is to be a big Netflix announcement next week. Jagannathan was picked for this two-hander sitcom—she has never done a sitcom—from a worldwide casting with 25000 candidates. With some people, you never know what’s coming the next day. And with Poorna Jagannathan, it’s never even the same hair.
