Interview with Director Roshan Sethi and Actor Karan Soni (A Nice Indian Boy)

Director Roshan Sethi’s A Nice Indian Boy is a heartfelt American queer romantic comedy adapted from Madhuri Shekar’s stage play of the same name, which has been impressing theatre audiences since 2014. The story follows Naveen (played by Karan Soni), a gay Indian-American doctor who falls in love with Jay (Jonathan Groff) – and takes him home to his ‘crazy’ Indian family. As Sethi puts it, it’s “like My Fat Big Greek Wedding, but gay and with Indian characters” – capturing themes of love, acceptance, family, and cultural clashes.

Portraying an interracial love story, the film combines traditional rom-com tropes with touching performances and a lively mix of humor, sweetness, and romance. Sethi and Soni worked closely with scriptwriter Eric Randall, adding elements of their personal experiences both as Indians and as a real-life couple. We spoke with them about working together on the movie, their creative partnership, and their thoughts on the film’s impact within LGBTQ+ cinema.

I read that A Nice Indian Boy was shot in a very short time span. Can you share with us how you managed to pull that off – and was it exhausting?

SETHI: Yes, we shot it in three weeks, working six-day weeks. It was extremely challenging. We also had only four weeks to prepare – which is half the time you’d normally have. It was crazy. The cast didn’t really have time to rehearse. The first movie I did with Karan was 7 Days [2021 romantic comedy and Sethi’s directorial debut], and I signed on to direct this movie after I finished that one, but in the interval, while we were waiting for this movie to get up and running, I shot a Disney movie [2023 musical comedy World’s Best] that ended up being… more complicated than this one. So I learnt some lessons, and brought that experience onto this one.

A Nice Indian Boy is an adaptation of the play by Madhuri Shekar, but since you and Karan are real-life partners, does the movie include autobiographical elements? It certainly feels very personal…

SETHI: The play ran successfully for many years, as it’s been on intermittently since 2014 – and performed for almost a decade. So we knew it worked. The script is an amazing cinematic adaptation written by Eric Randall. Obviously, yes, we put a lot of our own lived experience into it, being Indian and gay, and in a partnership with Karan, and with me being a doctor as well. In many ways, he is playing a version of me – Naveen is a gay Indian doctor too. Adapting and directing it from a play to a movie was not the difficult part for me, It made sense to me as a movie, even before it was one.

SONI: Totally. A lot of our own life was part of the material, to the point that it felt like it was made for us – like it was written for me almost, even if it wasn’t. It felt personal for both of us and then we decided to add more personal stuff to it. The producers and everyone were open to those ideas, so it made it exciting for us. It was very cathartic and therapeutic.

While A Nice Indian Boy embraces some of the conventions of romantic comedies, it enriches the genre in terms of South Asian representation and its fresh perspective on coming out in different communities. What do you hope audiences will take away from it?

SETHI: That our experience is as interesting as those of straight people – if not more interesting, honestly. One of the things that’s happening in entertainment right now is we’ve made it into, like, a buffet where gay movies are for gay audiences, and Indian movies are for Indian audiences. It is clearly wrong. Everyone should be consuming everything, because movies are a great way to generate empathy and understand how other people live. And the more we keep making entertainment that only centers on ‘our own’, the more we reinforce a sense of segregation – or self-segregation. The truth is, we are all fundamentally the same. Every difference is superficial. I feel it deeply, perhaps more profoundly than most, because of my job as a doctor. Our differences are only skin-deep. So I think our movie belongs to the genre, but adds all these other elements connected to our families and cultural traditions, and it plays the romance in the context of these two people. This isn’t your traditional romcom. Romcoms are difficult to pull off – and to make! – because they follow those conventions, but they need shaking up, they need to feel fresh, and we’re very proud of this one.

How did you involve Jonathan Groff in the project?

SETHI: We cold-submitted to his agent, and we were fortunate enough that he said yes. He had liked one movie of ours [7 Days], which had some similar concepts in it and had some buzz. He liked that film enough that he said yes to this. But he didn’t know Karan is gay or that we’re real-life partners when he said he’d take the role. I said, “He is gay, and with me!” – and we ended up making it work. The chemistry between Karan and Jonathan was a godsend, really, because they had barely interacted before we shot the movie, as there were no rehearsals, but Jonathan is the kindest, most earnest, sweetest person. He is so full of love. Him saying yes was the reason this film was funded and made.

SONI: We felt so lucky. We really liked Jonathan, and we love spending time with him now, getting the movie out there. I hope it shows on screen.