For director Roshan Sethi, his latest film is deeply personal.
His project, A Nice Indian Boy, is set in the US and follows Naveen, an introverted doctor who brings home his fiance Jay to meet his traditional Indian family.
Sethi, in addition to filmmaking, is a practising physician in palliative care at Dana Farber Cancer Institute who just six years ago came out to his family as gay.
“I really was, until those six years ago, planning to just ride this out and pretend to be straight and marry someone and to have kids,” he tells Sky News.
“I really thought I could get away with it for the rest of my life – I thought I had to”.
He says, looking back, he is glad he made the decision when he did to show his true self to the world and now, “after years of struggling to come out, I myself am getting married to a man”.
His partner is Karan Soni, a recognisable face in Hollywood who has previously starred in films like Deadpool and Wolverine, Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, and Ghostbusters.
They met on a dating app and have since become partners in life, as well as in creative endeavours.
Their film A Nice Indian Boy, which stars Soni and Frozen star Jonathan Groff, had its world premiere at the London Film Festival but is still awaiting a distributor for the UK and Ireland market.
Pic: Levantine Films/Wayfarer Studios
‘Independent film demands a white lead’
“Without Jonathan, this movie would not have been financeable,” Sethi says, explaining that the film was “passed on by every major studio that you can think of and also every major financier except for the two who finally made it – Levenstein and Wayfarer”.
The director says it feels like it “doesn’t matter” in the industry that Soni has been in huge franchise movies, they still needed a white lead to get the film made.
“It’s all an ecosystem that you can’t solve or fix. You just have to operate in it,” he says.
“The problem behind non-white leads in independent films has always been that independent films depend to such a great extent on foreign pre-sales, which really means the UK and Europe”.
He adds: “They are largely dependent, in the eyes of financiers and in the eyes of the quote-unquote marketplace, on [having] white leads so that makes the maths really tough to get a movie like this off the ground”.
A Nice Indian Boy is Soni’s second lead role – his first was another project with his fiance, a rom-com called 7 days.
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The actor says it all feels “very overwhelming” because he never thought playing a starring role in a film was a possibility for him and remarks on the importance of representation on the big and small screen.
“I started auditioning professionally in 2010 and all I was up for were co-star [roles], which is like five lines and under”.
He adds: “I remember at the time Mindy Kaling was on The Office and Aziz Ansari was on Parks and Recreation and that was it”.
“I was not expecting to really have [the opportunity], I was kind of very ignorant about the future and I just wanted one episode of a TV show – that was [the extent of] my dream”.
The Abbott Elementary actor says after working on multiple film and TV sets over the years, “it felt like everything had aligned” for him to take the next step in his career.
Pic: Levantine Films/Wayfarer Studios
‘It depicts my personal dream’
Heart-warming and funny throughout, A Nice Indian Boy looks at the pressures of finding a person who, not only you love and want to spend your life with, but also someone who respects your beliefs and desires in the world.
Sethi says that, despite it being a romantic comedy, it societally is an important relationship to depict on screen.
“I grew up on larger-than-life straight weddings in Bollywood. I loved them desperately – and have grown also to resent them for their narrowness, for the fact that I was obsessed with stories I could never be part of”.
In 2018, India‘s Supreme Court ruled that gay sex was no longer a criminal offence.
The ruling overturned a 2013 decision to uphold a law, section 377, that specified gay sex as an “unnatural offence” punishable by up to 10 years in jail.
Sethi says that, even when they were preparing for filming the project, they faced barriers.
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“When we planned the wedding ceremony in the movie, we reached out to Hindu priests across North America for help with the details. We were rejected by many, including one local priest who texted a slur”.
“Making the movie meant we were facing my mother’s worst fears. We discovered why she was afraid and why we needed to do it anyway”.
He says the film looks to depict the dream scenario for him and his upcoming nuptials.
“I’m getting married in a few months. For now, my mother has asked me not to proceed. But the movie ends in a different, more fanciful way – it ends in my personal dream of family acceptance and belonging”.