Portside

It took more than two decades for Poorna Jagannathan to score a TV role that brought her to the forefront like Never Have I Ever. After four seasons of playing a stern, sincere mom in Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s Netflix series, she’s found her next calling—and the actor is glad the roles are nothing alike. Jagannathan kills it in Hulu’s Deli Boys as Lucky, an unapologetic and sarcastic mafia boss. In the comedic thriller, after losing her mentor, Lucky teams up with his two sons (played by Saagar Shaikh and Asif Ali) to maintain a grasp on the family’s drug-smuggling business. 

Created by Abdullah Saeed, Deli Boys also centers South Asians in a genre that they’re rarely featured in, which is another reason Jagannathan was drawn to the show. Plus, she didn’t want to pass up the chance to do more outright comedy as nerve-wracking as that was for her. The A.V. Club spoke to the actor about watching Real Housewives to get into Lucky’s mindset, flexing her improv muscles, and what to expect from HBO’s Lanterns. 

The A.V. Club: You’ve gotten to do a range of roles on TV over the years. Do you have a criteria for the characters you are looking for?

Poorna Jagannathan: Not so much characters but very much the writing. I wasn’t sure who Lucky was going to be in Deli Boys or what her arc was going to be when I read the pilot, for example. I could see she’s hilarious in the few scenes she’s in, but it’s hard to gauge the character so early. Still, I knew I wanted to be part of that writing and that world. I could never imagine a character like Lucky would exist for me to play or just that we are at a stage where she can exist. It’s mind-blowing.

AVC: What was it about the writing that stood out? 

PJ:  Deli Boys feels so up my alley in terms of what I like to see on TV. It’s a genre that entertains me in life. It puts something sweet, nurturing, intimate, and lovely in one scene and then something violent right after that. The two exist side by side. The more you lean into that sweet aspect, the more the other will just stand out. I love writing that puts the expected and the unexpected next to each other. As the scripts go on, Lucky is given a backstory whereas I am used to playing characters that are at the back of the story. Most of the time these characters don’t get any time, space, exposition, or arc to grow. I’m used to that. The roles I got in shows like Big Little Lies and Never Have I Ever are exceptions along the way. 

I love how Lucky is written as sweet yet sinister, ambitious, and wildly powerful. She’s also the only woman in the room almost all the time. The writing can also get intense, like in episode six, when Lucky is kidnapped by a character played by Tan France. There’s a moment where she displays extraordinary grief about losing her mentor, Baba [Iqbal Theba]. Lucky can go into that emotional space and cry about it with his sons, Raj and Mir, and then knife people two seconds later. I love all of that. 

AVC: You haven’t done as many comedic roles. Did you have any specific influences for Deli Boys? 

PJ: This is going to sound absurd but, without missing a day, I watched The Real Housewives Of Orange County. Every single night of filming, I watched it. Usually when I’m filming something, I look for a documentary that will help me because sometimes, as an actor, you forget to ground the performance in reality, so documentaries help me do that. I was trying to look [at] different things for Deli Boys. I watched The Sopranos, too. And weirdly, watching Housewives helped the most. 

Actually, one time before we started filming, I was out with my mom in Toronto. We were having dinner at a Persian restaurant, and there was a Parsi lady with her two sons eating next to us. One of the sons had watched Never Have I Ever, so we struck up a conversation. Her sons were grown-ass men in their late twenties, by the way. And this woman was very put together, fashionable, lovely, and clearly a great mom. Then she just wiped their mouth gently after their food was done. And just like, I felt like I found my Lucky. Between her and Housewives, I was set. 

AVC: What about once you got to set? Was there a line or a costume that helped snap exactly who Lucky was in place for you? 

PJ: Yes, I have a distinct memory of it. Obviously, I knew Deli Boys was a comedy, but I hadn’t done it to this degree. I didn’t even think of the physical comedy part of it. I kept thinking it’ll be a case where I could play it mostly straight. And then someone, I forget if it was [producer] Vali Chandrasekaran, our director Nisha Ganatra, or creator Abdullah Saeed, but one of them said we are trying to go for that Righteous Gemstones tone. If anyone hasn’t seen it, it’s purely ridiculous and great. Once they said that to me, it started unlocking a lot. There’s a scene in the premiere when the DarCo offices get raided by the FBI. It’s a simple scene, but within that, I then tried to do something like tearing up all the documents and yelling at the assistant to eat the paper, and he does do it. We were allowed and encouraged to do stuff like that. It opened the floodgates for us to come to set and be more ridiculous than we were the day before.  

There’s another scene in the pilot when Lucky is comforting Raj and Mir after they’ve lost their dad, and they ask her if she’ll take care of them now. Hands down it’s the funniest scene any of us have ever shot. We couldn’t get through it. Asif and Saagar play dumb fucks on the show, but they’re so smart in real life. And it’s such a bonding experience when everyone is laughing together. We were always trying to one up each other with the humor. It was like a bunch of clowns joining the circus and being rowdy. It’s also the kind of chemistry and relationship we share off the screen and that includes our other co-stars Brian Ahmed and Alfie Fuller, too.  

AVC: It sounds like a fun and freeing environment to work in. 

PJ: Yes, exactly, it was very freeing. It made room for us to improvise. Some of the improv made it in. Like in this one scene, Lucky is telling Raj to pick up a gun from the credenza. Saagar was doing the line reading and very earnestly asked, not as Raj but as himself, “What’s a credenza?” People just cracked up, and that ended up in the show. 

AVC: Since you’re relatively new to the genre, what’s something unexpected you learned? 

PJ: If I had been told from the beginning about the physical comedy, I might’ve been more intimidated. I grew up watching British comedy shows so that’s what I like and understand more than American sitcoms. Those I do not get as much. So even with Never Have I Ever, it was intimidating to enter that world and carry the tone for multiple seasons. When I wrapped NHIE, I’m trying to remember when we finished, but I got the Deli Boys script like a month later. I wasn’t ready to be in another TV show yet. I felt exhausted and spent. Then the idea of being part of another South Asian project made me wonder if I should do it or not. There’s always this pressure as an actor to go mainstream, and you and I both know what mainstream is usually code for. Deli Boys was also going to shoot in Chicago partly during the winter, which is not my vibe at all [laughs]. But then I read the script and found it irresistible. I felt that way when I read Lanterns as well. When I started acting, people would always ask me what dream roles I wanted and I never imagined a place where these types of shows would come to me. 

AVC: Speaking of HBO’s Lanterns, the show has just gone into production. What can you share about being part of this DC superhero series? 

PJ: Not much just yet. I can say it has all the elements of Green Lantern. It’s got everything that DC Comics is known and beloved for. But every character is written with an aspect of hero and villain intertwined that makes everything so intense and grounded. It feels like my world, and I say that as someone who has never picked up a comic book in my entire life. There are references in the script to a place called Oa. That’s what it says, and at first I thought to myself, “Okay, this is a writer who loves vowels or something.” I had no idea it’s an established part of a planet. So it’s not something I’m familiar with but I’ve been excited to learn about. For other people like me who might not be as familiar, that audience will still relate to the show and the characters deeply.