Over the course of its four seasons on Netflix, Never Have I Ever served its humor with a side of sadness as the show’s protagonist, Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), navigates the academic and social rigors of high school while grieving the loss of her father and champion, Mohan. Though hothead Devi’s incrementally hard-won maturity in friendship and romance is at the core of the show, its bedrock is her home life with her mother, Nalini (Poorna Jagannathan); cousin Kamala (Richa Moorjani); and grandmother Nirmala, a.k.a. Patti (“grandma” in Tamil, played by Ranjita Chakravarty).
Nalini’s nuanced journey as she manages her own grief and career while mothering an often defiant daughter whom she initially finds deeply baffling, claims more space as the show progresses. The series finale — featuring a lively, joyous interfaith wedding and many sweet callbacks to the pilot — highlights how far Nalini and Devi have come. Some things never change: Each still finds the other exasperating, but they’re hugging each other tight in coordinating gold-and-jewel-tone saris from Indian designer Sabyasachi, a sight that would have been unthinkable in the pilot.
Jagannathan isn’t done with comedy thanks to a live-wire performance as over-the-top villain Rehan in The Out-Laws, Netflix’s new fizzy action-comedy co-starring Pierce Brosnan and Ellen Barkin. Jagannathan notes that having grown up on James Bond, especially Brosnan’s performances, “I have always wanted to play a Bond villain. That’s been on my bucket list right alongside playing an immigrant mom.”
Casting your mind back to the beginning of Never Have I Ever, what drew you to playing Nalini?
Just to be a part of Mindy Kaling’s TV universe was huge. To play a role that came from Mindy’s and Lang Fisher’s points of view, that was huge. Their very particular sense of humor is so unexpected, lively, and irreverent. Mindy’s one of the only brown role models we have out there in that show-creating role, and she just spoke to me in a way no one else did.
I was so excited to play an immigrant mom. I’m an immigrant mom, as are my mom, my aunt, and my sister, and I’ve always been so deeply disappointed at the supposed portrayals of what people think my life is like. TV immigrant moms are always the foil to their kids. They are written to be completely clueless, as if they only care about getting their kids married off, and then say a punch line. So playing a three-dimensional immigrant mom has always been on my bucket list. To portray some of what we deal with, our struggles, what we left behind, where we’re going, the sense of isolation, the sense of relief, the sense of opportunity, the sense of joy, of being able to give your kid what you didn’t have — I mean, everything! It’s a very intensely personal journey. When you have an opportunity to see yourself reflected and represented accurately in media, that can make you the hero of your own story and take you from the sidelines into the center.
Knowing how you draw on your own personal history to play Nalini, what about this role made the most lasting impression on you?
I think the show gives people a sense of home, and I’ve been thinking about that this season particularly. I grew up on American TV — Family Ties, The Cosby Show — and I just remember so clearly needing to find TV families. When you see a family that’s working through issues and is up against hardship and they still have so much joy in them, somehow you become an unseen character in that show. You insert yourself in unconscious ways into that family dynamic onscreen.
So I’ve been thinking a lot about the parenting lessons, the lessons of self that Niecy Nash’s character gives as Dr. Ryan, the way Mohan can hold such beautiful space for his daughter, and Nalini’s struggle with trying to gain intimacy with Devi when that wasn’t initially her role as a parent — those struggles of TV parents going through it with their kids, that push and pull that happens in a family. It’s such an important place for kids and even adults to find families where they can work through their own things as they watch.
It’s remarkable how, even when you’re not seeing a representation of your actual family, you insert yourself and find what speaks to you in it.
The beauty of the family in Never Have I Ever is that it’s so intergenerational. I do believe all the women are different versions of the same woman in different stages of life. Nalini was Kamala. Patti was Nalini. Everyone looks for those kinds of relationships. I was in India earlier this year, and I met this trans girl who loved the show, and in our conversation, she thanked me for mothering her, especially during the time when her own mother couldn’t show up for her. I think TV families have the capacity to mother and father and provide siblings at times when your own family doesn’t know how to.
That gets at something Never Have I Ever does particularly well: It’s such a funny show, but it portrays a realistic view of how grief and time work together to reshape relationships between those left behind. Losing Mohan was devastating for both Devi and Nalini, and it plunged Nalini into providing everything her daughter needed during the worst time of her own life. How did you approach that aspect of the role?
There’s a scene in the last season that I think really reflects Nalini’s experience and journey. It’s a subtle little moment in the middle of a chaotic family meeting. Nalini has this realization that she doesn’t leave her grief behind; grief decides to unlatch from her. It takes the time that it takes, and one day you wake up and it’s not as bad as it was, but it’s nothing you can will away. It will go away when the time comes. Those little things about what grief actually looks like are so beautiful to me.
When the writing is so personal and so delicate and so full of little things from the writers’ lives and experiences, that makes the acting approach so easy. Their dialogue was in my dialogue, things they wanted to say and never said. It’s just these very personal things that show up on the page, and it always carries meaning for me. It’s like chewing gum; it just feels effortless.
Looking ahead to Nalini’s future, what are your hopes and wishes for her in her romance with Andres, in her new status as an empty nester, and in her relationship with Devi?
I’m so hopeful! Like Nalini, I am going to be an empty nester next year, and as a mother, there’s such a focus on caring for other people — what does it mean now? It’s time to pause and see all the ways you can care for yourself and give to yourself, and that’s a whole new journey. I’m hopeful because in our relationship, Devi has grown exponentially, and she and Nalini have started to see each other more deeply and fully as years go by.
This show is such a fierce depiction of family love, and I love that about it but it’s also a journey into self-love. I wish for Nalini to get to explore her sexuality and sensuality and womanhood in this new phase, and I hope she gets an even more fantastic wardrobe. Devi isn’t the only one who graduated. This was a graduation for Nalini as well, graduation into a life where she can start using all of the lessons she’s learned in the last four years.
What do you make of the state of South Asian actors in American television and film? What kind of characters do you wish we got to see more of?
I think we’ve just scratched the surface. There has been a giant leap in terms of representation, in terms of sheer numbers. Each season of Never Have I Ever crammed in more and more incredibly talented South Asian actors, getting to play real human beings on-screen. The depth of talent out there is staggering.
It’s so wonderful to see shows like Beef, where there was a really funny meme saying, “We went from Crazy Rich Asians to Broke-Ass Asians in no time!” I love these stories. In my next project, Deli Boys, we’re all successful South Asians, we’re hardworking immigrants, yet we’re also running a full-on cocaine business. I can’t wait for that story to come out.
Within every model-minority family like mine, which is full of doctors and lawyers and all that, there are also such intense stories of addiction and loss and suicide and depression and anxiety. We’re so messy, but onscreen, we’re shown as very put together with no time taken to see the other side of the coin. I’m really excited to be a part of flipping that coin over, looking at and telling the stories there. The truth is life happens to everyone, not only to white people. We have to show that aspect for South Asian characters, too.
Where do you see more of those stories from the other side of the coin coming from?
It’s really women of color who are creating stories for other women of color right now. These deep, meaningful stories come from the Shondas and the Avas and the Mindys, and it feels like no one else is out there generating content.
What prompts change isn’t casting a South Asian female lead in a show, it’s the ecosystem that the South Asian female lead brings in. It’s her lovers, her siblings, her family, all of that texture and life around the lead is what starts changing things. I often say there’s screen time versus scene time, and what I mean is, like, a person of color may have screen time, but do you really get to know them and where they come from, what makes them tick and why they are who they are? That comes from really investing in a character in that ecosystem.
We’ve been talking about the importance of quality three-dimensional roles for South Asian actors, but let’s not ignore the significance of over-the-top roles. Tell me about playing Rehan, the bad guy in The Out-Laws. How did you figure out what volume that character needed to be at? Almost everybody else is already performing at a 9 or a 10, and Rehan has to be even louder than that.
I loved it. She just takes the disco and the bullets wherever she goes. You see it in her gold sequined dress and then a blue sequined jumpsuit and a sequined pink and black jacket — the sequins do a lot of the talking. And chaos just erupts. Rehan does a lot of her most important communicating and talking in cars while shooting. We improvised our way toward an accent for her; it’s completely made up, but the right one made the humor work. It had to convey that “she’s killed ten people and hasn’t even had breakfast yet.”
A multitasking icon. Did you improvise dialogue on set, too? You get some truly wild lines saying some of the most obscene things both to and about Pierce Brosnan’s character, Billy. How did all that come about?
The bones of it were scripted, things like Rehan’s massive crush on Billy, how Lily is in Rehan’s way as she pursues the love of her life, and how Rehan thinks kidnapping Billy’s daughter is her pathway to him. This kind of comedy is also something I’ve always wanted to do and was afraid of, so I took a two-hour improv lesson from Edi Patterson. She plays Judy on The Righteous Gemstones and is pure id in that role! She taught me how to take an idea on the page and blow it up into absurdity really fast. As soon as I started doing that on set, the writers started giving me ten different versions of lines, each one funnier than the others. They used some of my improvisations in the end too — Machine Gun Kelly’s “skinny dick energy,” Billy’s “corn on the cob dick,” I think those were both mine. I could work on that set for the rest of my life.
