Hello It’s always nerve wracking to bring someone home, but what if you haven’t been entirely open with your family about your sexuality, or their ethnicity?

That’s the premise of the film A Nice Indian Boy, a romcom which follows Naveen, an Indian American doctor who brings his white partner home to meet his very traditional family.

In this episode, actor Karan Soni (Deadpool, Detective Pikachu, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) and director Roshan Sethi talk about awkward parents, LGBTQ stories in Bollywood, and putting together a gay Indian wedding on screen for the first time!!!

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Our interview is below (lightly edited for clarity).

Roshan Sethi, director: “It was based on a play called The Nice Indian Boy by Madhuri Shekar. She wrote the play in 2014 and a company financier, producer optioned the play and then actually sent it to us as a script that had been written by a screenwriter named Eric Randall for consideration as a team to direct. So we didn't find the underlying material, but it happened to correlate with something that we were going through personally, which was I had just come out.

Only a few years before I received the script, Karan and I were, are in a relationship. So we ended up being really excited to take it on based on that experience.

Were there themes in the film you knew from the beginning you wanted to include or address?

RS: Yeah, just that it ends in a big gay Indian wedding I think was important to everybody involved because it's never really been done on screen before. There's never been a same-sex Hindu ceremony. And that it have a tone of joy and love. Because if I had actually been tasked with writing a movie about being gay and South Asian, I think it would be much darker and more harrowing than what Madhuri and Eric have written. And that was the thing that I was amazed by in the script, is it had a very populous tone.

It wasn't like trying to be an obscure piece of art. It wasn't trying to be harrowing and trenchant and it was just full of joy. So that was the tone I think we all immediately signed on for.

Karan Soni, actor: The other thing that we really liked about the play and the movie was that the parents were such a big part of it. Like they felt like such full characters. Often in these kind of movies, the parents are the butt of the joke or they become caricatures and we always thought that was the superpower of the play and the movie is that these characters that you think at the beginning of the movie are laughing at, maybe a little bit by the end of the movie are the characters that are probably gonna make you cry the most, and you misunderstood them or misjudged them and that felt unique and special about this project.

TO: The parents line really affected me because I have a really complicated relationship with my dad. And I was just wondering, like because there was a scene in the film where she was like, I don't wanna say the wrong thing 'cause that might be the end of it’. Do you feel like making this movie has really opened up perspectives for you in terms of parents and their generation for you both?

RS: It gave me a lot of empathy actually for my family because the play really forces you to consider their perspective. Interestingly, that line where she says, “when you bleed, we bleed for you”. Or when you even prick your finger, whatever, “we bleed for you”. That, and that reveal of that speech that she doesn't understand them had been cut from the script and I restored it because I was so struck by it from the play, and it really moves me every time I see it and hear it.

KS: You always learn something because a lot of straight men, when they watch the movie, they're always like, I cried in one scene and it's always the same scene for straight men, which is my character and dad in front of the wedding venue, and I'm basically uninviting him potentially to the wedding and they have the father-son sort of moment in the car.

And that is, it's so interesting, what different people take from the movie, but every straight man is that's me trying to talk to my dad and not making any progress. And there's always very interesting, like different people's experiences with their families, gay, straight men, women, whatever it is, they find different scenes that are all related to the parents, which is cool.

One of my favourite scenes is when Jay (Jonathan Groff) starts cooking with your dad in the movie and he starts adding dates to the meal or suggests it and then he ends up adding it. And this moved me so much, was there a scene for you both that you found really affecting?

RS: Yeah, I felt the most affected on set when they actually got married at the end of the ceremony and they walked down the aisle and people throw petals.

Maybe because I had never imagined being there in that moment for that both witnessing something that was real, but then being part of creating it for something that's actually fake, like the whole thing was so insane and Karan is in it and is my real life partner, but he's in the wedding. So the whole thing was very emotional.

Watching the movie, I find myself not really affected by that part at all actually. So it wasn't like the onset experience. The part that affects me is always the same scene, which I think you just mentioned, where Jonathan and Harish Patel, who plays Karan's dad or cooking together, that for some reason that scene almost really gets me.

KS: For me performing it was this, it was the scene where there's the first proposal at the accidental one. That one was always because it felt like this character so rarely was showing emotion, and in that scene. He goes from being so quiet and repressed to literally expressing the highest level of love, which is to ask someone to marry them.

And performing that in a very short amount of time always felt like it's all burbling inside. So that one was a big one while performing. That always felt emotional.

I loved how you remake that scene in DDLJ to propose. Do you feel there's been a shift in LGBTIQA+ visibility in Bollywood movies?

RS: There have been a few Bollywood movies that have explicitly addressed LGBTQ identities. And that was definitely like unimaginable 15 years ago. So there's certainly been progress made. But I wouldn't say it's gone as far as everyone would like.

KS: Yeah. They're never the leads, they're always the supporting characters and it still feels like there's some shame there, to be honest. 'Cause they're not unabashedly being themselves if they have love interests. It's a little bit hidden and it doesn't feel like it's being celebrated always in the way we are trying to with this movie.

What kind of shift would you like to see, in terms of stories being told?

RS: I think that hopefully there would be a move towards more LGBT content. There is quite a bit of it actually in the independent film scene, but not as much in mainstream Bollywood out of a sense of fear - I'm sure, I'm assuming that's behind it.

But India is a rapidly changing place. It was illegal to be gay technically until 2018. That penal code was overturned. That penal code, interestingly, was inherited from the British who brought Victorian morality to India, where laws against homosexuality and even against being transgender didn't exist prior to the British arriving.

Now there's a big movement underway to legalize gay marriage, and I feel that it will happen in the next decade in India. So India is just rapidly changing and hopefully the arts will reflect that. Sometimes it feels like the arts are meant to be a mirror to society, but they actually often lead society and we sometimes forget that.

A lot of the critical gay representation in American cinema and TV is the reason I think that we were eventually led to gay marriage, I think beyond the Ellen DeGeneres show and Will and Grace both had a huge impact on being gay in America before any of those things were legal.

My sister-in-law married an Indian man, and the ceremonies were so beautiful and colourful. You mentioned that it was the first time in a ceremony it’d been portrayed like this in a movie. How did it feel being able to put that on screen and filming it for you both?

RS: It felt amazing. I think the hardest part of it was just finding a pandit who was willing, A pandit is the Hindu equivalent of a priest. The word pandit actually means priest. And it's made its way into the English language to mean something else.

But we have a tough time finding a pandit who is willing to help us tailor the Hindu ceremony to a gay couple and experienced a bit of homophobia in Canada. I actually had a pandit text me the F word, which was crazy. But we eventually did find someone who was willing to help us in the ceremony that you see is adapted from what a real Hindu ceremony would look like.

But it was, yeah, it was really difficult. It was actually the thing that stressed me out the most, because I'm not a priest and I don't know what they're up to around that fire. What they're planting, what they're throwing, which directions they're moving. But I wanted it to be authentic.

Then when I received that text from the priest, I thought, what do I care if they're rejecting me? What do I care about safeguarding their traditions when their traditions have just led them to hate? But then I ended up finding in the directing of it at least a balance where it is actually, I think, very authentic.

But it brings it into the new world, and that's how cultures work. Every single culture in history has adapted and readapted and readapted and all the things that we hold as being ancient or actually an amalgamation of a million different movements and fights and struggles and nothing is like homogenously carried down from antiquity.

TO: And you mentioned in the director’s statement that you’re getting married in a few months. Congratulations!!

KS&RS: We're gonna go to a courthouse. We're gonna go to a courthouse a

Episode ID: 1000717148304

GUID: substack:post:167773205

Release Date: 14/07/2025, 13:56:37