Working with anyone on a movie set is hard, but for director Roshan Sethi, collaborating with his partner, actor Karan Soni (we spoke to both previously for 7 Days), on A Nice Indian Boy wasn’t as hard as you might think. “We had almost no conflict while making this, which people never believe,” he told me about filming their new romcom. “The only things that always come up for me are that I am so attuned to Karan’s emotions that sometimes I forget he’s just acting, and that really throws me. Like, when he gets upset in the movie, I hate it. I hate looking at him being upset, especially being in the same room as him for that stuff.”

Soni has quite the emotional arc in A Nice Indian Boy, which follows a young Hindu doctor trying to reconcile his love life with his family life. It’s not a coming out story per se, but it explores what living authentically looks like after someone’s “I’m gay.” Soni related to that. “I came out when I was 19, and in my head prior to that, I was like, ‘It will all be over once I say it.’ It sounded so definitive,” he said. “But it’s so much more complicated than that. It’s a daily thing sometimes of being like … ‘Do I want to get into this right now or not?” There’s always a mental math you’re playing.” He recognized that, for his character, Naveen couldn’t even have that basic partner conversation with his parents. 

“Bringing your partner home to your family, especially if they are not who your parents imagined, can feel like a war and a very scary thing.  That part of the movie felt so rich to me.”

Adding to that richness are Zarna Garg and Sunita Mani, who play Naveen’s overly attentive mother and token older sister Arundhathi. Mani appreciated that this wasn’t a coming-out movie. “We’re dropped in the middle of this family’s journey, and it’s really nuanced to do that. We’re not centering the conflict around a coming out story. We’re in the middle of how this family is and will change over the course of 90 minutes.”

For Garg, she was just happy that A Nice Indian Boy was, what she called,  a “happy brown people movie.” 

“Thank you, God, for writing a happy brown people movie. Not a sad brown people movie. Nothing against all the sad brown people movies, but we’ve had a lot of those. What we haven’t had is the movie we should have had, which is the big Indian wedding movie.” 

She points out that this new film rights a major wrong in Western cinema. “It’s so irritating that the Greeks are the reigning champions of the “Wedding Movie”. It is not okay, My Big Fat Greek Wedding. They’re not the wedding people. We’re the wedding people in this world.”

A Nice Indian Boy is now playing in select theaters. Please enjoy the interview below, and my review here.