‘Welcome to Chippendales’: A First Look at Kumail Nanjiani’s Male Stripping Empire (original) (raw)

The first time Kumail Nanjiani was asked to play Somen Banerjee, the founder of the male exotic-dance troupe known as Chippendales, he didn’t feel ready—to embody somebody so different from him, to play a dramatic role of such epic scope, to throw out every performance crutch he’d adopted across more than a decade of appearing onscreen. This was right after The Big Sick, the breakout rom-com he starred in and cowrote with his wife, Emily V. Gordon, which scored them a screenplay Oscar nomination. Robert Siegel, the writer behind acclaimed films like The Wrestler and The Founder, pitched Nanjiani hard to take on the part. “Kumail was always my first choice,” Siegel says. “I think he was a little reluctant, or maybe nervous, about playing a bad guy.”

A bad guy, you say? Delve into the history of Chippendales and you’ll encounter a bizarre saga of sex, drugs, and a surprising amount of murder. The shocking chain of events, which took place in ’80s Los Angeles, has long felt destined for a juicy screen treatment. Scripts have been written; actors such as Dev Patel and Bollywood icon Aamir Khan have circled various projects—but years went by and this “arms race,” as Siegel calls it, flamed out. (Though Naveen Andrews did star in a 2000 TV movie.) Siegel’s feature-film script gathered dust in a drawer. Then streaming came knocking after he created Hulu’s Emmy-nominated hit Pam & Tommy: “I’d spent 15 years in the indie-film salt mines, and I was just watching it get harder and harder to get things made,” Siegel says. “Now, a lot of indie movies have had a second life as limited series.”

Quentin Plair as Otis, a Chippendales dancer.

By Erin Simkin/Hulu.

The episodic format only helps a tale as dense, complicated, and wild as Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales. Put simply, there’s a lot of ground to cover. That goes both for the sprawling ensemble cast and for the man at its center. “This is by far the most challenging job I’ve ever done, in terms of the length of the shoot, the content of the scenes, and emotional difficulty of those scenes,” says Nanjiani, who joined the project after Siegel’s offer came back around years later, this time as a series. “It’s one of those things where I just jumped in, and trusted that it’d reveal itself as it goes—and it did.”

Welcome to Chippendales introduces Nanjiani’s Somen as an ambitious immigrant with eyes toward a grand American dream. He saves enough money from his day job at a gas station to open a nightclub, initially backgammon-themed—to very little fanfare—and from there explores various gimmicks to stand out in a seedy, starry Hollywood milieu. A sexy male striptease routine, exclusively performed for women, proves the marquee that sticks. He builds it into an empire that still exists today.

Murray Bartlett.

By Erin Simkin/Hulu.

Somen bumps into various corners of L.A. lore along the way: Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten (played by Nicola Peltz Beckham) and the husband who’d eventually kill her, Paul Snider (Dan Stevens); troubled Emmy-winning choreographer Nick De Noia (Murray Bartlett); hotshot filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich (Philip Shahbaz); and on. “It hit a lot of my pleasure buttons. It felt like Scarface or Goodfellas or _Boogie Nights,_” Siegel says. “It’s bad people doing bad things. But what differentiates it from another wannabe Martin Scorsese movie is that you take out Tony Montana and put in this nerdy, socially awkward Indian immigrant.”

If Somen enters the story as something of a determined, enigmatic social climber, he quickly emerges as a man corrupted by the success of his venture, willing to both protect himself and keep rising at all costs. He gets everything he wants but always wants more. He clashes with everyone, from various business partners to the sole Black dancer at Chippendales, Otis (Quentin Plair), as the club gets more exclusionary. The brewing conflict between Somen and Bartlett’s Nick, who cleans up and comes to define the Chippendales act, develops into the series’s central dynamic—and hurtles toward an outrageous conclusion. As Siegel puts it, “This was a chance to say a lot of things about the American dream, about capitalism, about assimilation, and what it means to be an American.”

Kumail Nanjiani.

By Erin Simkin/Hulu.

For months before shooting, Nanjiani went for long walks—by himself, with his wife, Emily. He wrote “pages and pages of nonsense” about Somen. He searched for tiny details, anything to unlock the most mysterious, complicated character of his career. Nanjiani was entering completely new territory as an actor, having made his name in sitcoms (Silicon Valley) and, more recently, Marvel blockbusters (Eternals): “How do you approach someone like this, who’s done so many horrible things? How do you play someone like that from the inside out?”

Nanjiani redefines himself as a performer here. Initially, he holds the screen with an off-kilter stillness, a premonition of bad things to come while maintaining a glint of innocence in Somen’s wide eyes. Emotional toll aside, the actor found the five-month production physically taxing. “He’s a lot stiffer than I am—he’s disconnected from his body, coiled really tight,” Nanjiani says. “I started having this back pain a few months into the shoot, this gnarly knot. It got worse and worse and the pain would go from there all the way up to my ear.” Then there was the matter of living inside such psychologically brutal material. Nanjiani never considered himself particularly Method; he wanted the process to feel like the TV show Severance, where “there’s your home life and there’s your work life.” Such separation became difficult to achieve: “The body doesn’t know the difference between you doing a sad scene and you being really sad in real life. I’d never done this kind of work.”

Juliette Lewis.

By Erin Simkin/Hulu.

He closely studied his costars, many of whom had more experience with this kind of material: Annaleigh Ashford, who plays Somen’s wife, Irene; Robin de Jesús, as the man Somen helps enlist for a brutal crime; Juliette Lewis, as a patron who takes an immediate liking to Chippendales; and, of course, Bartlett, a magnetic standout once again following his Emmy-nominated turn in The White Lotus. Nanjiani recalls observing Bartlett’s process and, months later, employing a technique he saw of his. “I talked to [the cast] a lot about approaching specific scenes, specific emotions, how to turn things off, how to snap in and how to snap out,” Nanjiani says. “This is the advantage of working with great people. You can really, really learn from them.”

Siegel says of Nanjiani, “I love stand-up comedians as dramatic actors, because they usually are tortured souls and it finds its way out, somewhere in the performance.” The showrunner pushed his lead to go to the dark side: “He does bad things…. You could say, Well, this is a negative portrayal of an Indian guy, but you could also choose to look at it like it subverts the stereotype of the model minority.” Coshowrunner Jenni Konner (Girls) adds, “Seeing [Kumail] do this kind of work, which is not his wheelhouse, was astonishing. The commitment to the role really blew my mind.”

Nanjiani with Annaleigh Ashford.

By Erin Simkin/Hulu.

Nanjiani with Robin de Jesús.

By Erin Simkin/Hulu.

Siegel focused intently on fleshing Somen out as a deeply flawed, fully alive human being—on his smarts, his insecurities, his sexual desires. Same for Bartlett’s Nick, a gay man past his prime in his career, galvanized by this cold, eventually deadly rivalry. “There is this trope of the tragic gay character who never finds happiness and dies in the end; I was very aware of not playing into that,” Bartlett says. “We had a chance to explore Nick’s sexuality in a way that was interesting and three-dimensional and doesn’t make him a tragic figure in that way.”

Indeed, watching Welcome to Chippendales, you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be in for a tragedy. The show is immediately raucous and indulgent, silly and strange. “On the surface, it’s really shiny and fun,” Siegel says. But those quiet hints of disaster, of the dark and painful elements skirting the story’s edges, get louder episode by episode. “He had so many moments where he could have taken the right road and he didn’t,” Nanjiani says of Somen. “There are five different forks and each time, each crossroad, he took the exact wrong path.” The bad path, of course, can make for a damn good time—that is, until you reach the end.

Welcome to Chippendales premieres later this year on Hulu.