It’s All Geek To Me — Mandvi on Fire — An Exclusive Interview with Aasif Mandvi from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender » 30ninjas

It’s All Geek To Me — Mandvi on Fire — An Exclusive Interview with Aasif Mandvi from M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender

Share on Facebook posted 06-02-10 by Dan Kaufman

Aasif Mandvi is doing it all wrong. Yes, he’s spent the last four years earning laughs as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, the hot-button political and social zeitgeist prism that has also helped launch the careers of Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell, Rob Corddry, and Ed Helms. But before that he was already an accomplished stage performer, playwright, and dramatic leading man, with the starring role in Ismail Merchant’s The Mystic Masseur. Usually, comedian is the first stop in a career, followed by all the hand-wringing and serious roles that the exposure later affords. Doesn’t he know you go from Mork & Mindy to Moscow on the Hudson, not the other way around? But this backwards trajectory is only further evidence of a versatile entertainer whose career defies labels.

Those who don’t watch The Daily Show will most likely recognize the Indian-born and British-raised actor from the litany of supporting roles he’s played in TV and film over the last decade or so. Seriously, his IMDB page reads like a pop culture roll call: Law & Order, Analyze This, Sex and the City, Oz, CSI, The Sopranos, Music and Lyrics, ER, Ghost Town, and The Proposal just to name a few. Aside from cult TV favorite Jericho, in the geek world he is probably best remembered as Mr. Aziz, the harried pizza-preneur who sends Peter Parker on a mad delivery dash through NYC in Spider-Man 2.

But this July 2nd, geeks will get to know Aasif a whole lot better as he is poised to add another role to the more serious side of his resume, and it’s a doozy. For the first time, he will be a major presence in a summer blockbuster franchise: the villainous Commander Zhao in M. Night Shyamalan’s highly anticipated fantasy action epic, The Last Airbender. Based on the Nickelodeon cartoon with mostly the same name (the “Avatar” had to be dropped due to its similarity to some little indie flick from last year), the film tells the story of a world with four nations based on the elements of air, water, earth, and fire. Certain members of each nation have the ability to “bend,” or control, their respective elements. The Fire Nation decides to conquer the others, and Zhao is the leader of a regiment tasked with hunting down the “Avatar”: a young boy who can supposedly bend all four elements, and is the chosen protector of the world.

I spoke with Aasif about being cast in his first big CGI blockbuster, the virtues of “nothing,” why Zhao might not be attending any Fire Nation family reunions any time soon, and the pure awesomeness of action.

Just Shootin’ the Breeze

DAN KAUFMAN: So how familiar with the cartoon were you when you auditioned?

AASIF MANDVI: I didn’t know anything about it. I’d never watched the cartoon before I got the audition. What happened was there was a period of time where they said, “Night is very interested in you for this role,” but he hadn’t actually made an offer yet. And so, in that period of time, between when they said, “Night is interested in you,” and when Night actually made the offer, I watched the first season of the cartoon. To understand a little bit more of my character, you know?

DAN: Were you excited to maybe be working with Night?

AASIF: It was weird, because I was actually—you know, I’d met M. Night Shyamalan briefly at the after-party for Lady in the Water, and I’d met him outside a Broadway show once. But I had never really spent any time talking to him or anything. After the audition they called me and said, “M. Night is gonna call you.” And I didn’t know if he was calling me to say, “Hey, you know, that was a terrible audition. Don’t ever audition for me again,” or if he was calling me to offer me a role. Maybe it’s, you know, a slow day, and he’s like, “Hey, I’ll call Aasif Mandvi and see what he’s up to. How’s life at The Daily Show?” I thought, “Maybe he’s just calling to chitchat, ’cause that’s what he does.”

DAN: Of course, he’s got nothing else going on.

AASIF: (laughs) Right. But then it turned out that he was calling to be like, “Hey, I loved your audition.” And we talked about it. I was in an airport, actually, on my way to shoot a piece for The Daily Show. So I was in the departure lounge at the airport and I get this call on my cell phone from Night, and he’s basically talking to me about this movie. And I’m boarding this flight, you know?

DAN: (laughs)

AASIF: By the end of it I was like, “Night, I gotta go! We’re taking off and they’re asking us to shut our cell phones off.” (laughs) And then he was just like, “Let’s do it. You wanna do it?” And I’m like, “Yeah, let’s do it!”

DAN: Awesome! So, the offer might have crashed the plane?

AASIF: It might have. It might have. (laughs) If I was like, “Listen! This is a really big deal for me! I can’t turn off my cell phone right now!” everyone on the plane would’ve been mad at me.

The Shakespeare Connection

DAN: Now, I get the sense that this whole project is kind of new territory for a lot of people involved. I mean, this is Night’s first adaptation of material that’s not his own. Aside from Spider-Man 2, this is your first huge, summer, tentpole action film. This is your first immersion into CGI, your first bad guy role…it’s kind of like dad is giving you the keys to the car for the first time.

AASIF: Yeah, yeah.

DAN: Was all this exciting? Intimidating?

AASIF: You know what? It was. It was all those things. It was exciting, it was intimidating. But you know, I’m thankful for my theater background. Because when you have CGI, people are always like, “How do you act when there’s nothin’ goin’ on? I mean, there’s a big screen of green, you know?” And I’m like, “But that’s what you do in the theater all the time.”

DAN: You act with nothing.

AASIF: I mean, in the theater, you’re standing there, and supposedly there’s a battle going on offstage, and you’re looking at this battle, and you’re going, “Ah-ha!” So it wasn’t that unbelievably weird. It was sort of like doing a play.

DAN: Right. And you had experience doing your one-man show, so…

AASIF: Well, yeah. I’d done a one-man show where I spent the entire show talking to people who weren’t there. So, the truth is I have a lot of experience pretending. In my [professional] life and my personal life, pretending things that don’t exist, exist. Like my supermodel girlfriend.

DAN: (laughs)

AASIF: So, that was exciting, and it was kind of fun. And the whole thing is, it’s a make-believe world, where it’s larger than life, so it’s very… it’s heightened. And it’s a world where there are bad guys and good guys, and it’s very Shakespearean to me.

DAN: Night said something like that in our interview with him. He said it’s a very Shakespearean story.

AASIF: Night doesn’t know what he’s talking about. (laughs) No, it is. I got cast as Zhao, and people might be like, “Oh, he is this comedy guy, doing this villainous character.” And the truth is, what I think that Night liked about my audition and stuff was that he said, “I don’t want Zhao to just be this sort of caricature of an evil villain that [you see] in a lot of movies. I want the guy to have a real intelligence and a real point of view, that you may fundamentally disagree with.” But he has a real point of view, you know? I mean, when I read the script, I thought, “This is a very interesting social—there’s a sort of spiritual and social message here.” You know, it’s about imperialism—

DAN: Oh, sure.

AASIF: It’s about colonialism. It’s about aggression. I mean, the thing is that the Fire Nation, as it is seen in this movie, really represents a sort of a hybrid of the Japanese Empire, the British Empire, the Nazis, the American Empire, this kind of imperial aggressive force in the world. And not to touch too much on the race stuff, but what I will say about it is if you just look at it as brown people versus white people, you are reducing it a little bit. It is a little bit more complicated than that. Because when you look at the Fire Nation as created in this film, it is kind of a hybrid of a lot of different influences, Eastern, Western, European. It’s British, it’s American, it’s Japanese, it’s Middle Eastern. It is a lot of things. And that’s why I kind of liked it. Night really wanted Zhao to have a real intelligence about him, and not just be a guy who’s just driven by, I mean, he is driven by ambition and vanity at the end of the day—

DAN: He’s in competition with Zuko.

AASIF: He’s in competition with Zuko. [But] it’s not just being in competition with Zuko. He has a very fundamental point of view and he’s fundamentally bereaved that he is more the rightful heir to the throne than Zuko is. And it’s very Edgar/Edmund from King Lear. I played the relationship between me and Dev [Patel]’s character very much like the relationship between Edgar and Edmund in King Lear. You know, they’re the two brothers. One is the bastard son, and one is the legitimate son. And Zhao is clearly the bastard son of the Fire Lord.

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting

DAN: Now let me ask you about the firebending itself. You had to be trained in martial arts, right?

AASIF: Well, yeah. We spent a good two months sort of learning—I mean, look, I didn’t come to this with any real martial arts training. And the truth is that I just had to learn some basic stuff that I could sort of pull off and make look somewhat authentic.

DAN: The fighting styles of the four nations are based on different martial arts, and the Fire Nation’s is Shaolin, a form of Kung Fu, right?

AASIF: That’s right.

DAN: So can you basically fend off muggers in an alley now?

AASIF: I can only fend off muggers in an alley if they do the exact moves that are in the movie. (laughs) And if there’s a fire source close by.

DAN: Did doing this film tap into a younger Aasif in any way? When you were growing up in England did you run around pretending to shoot lasers and fireballs from your hands?

AASIF: Well that’s the great thing about doing an action movie. Once you do an action movie, you never wanna go back to doing anything else, because it’s the best thing. As a boy, the coolest thing is to run and jump and kick ass, you know what I mean? I’ve spent the last few years doing The Daily Show and then doing romantic comedies, and I love doing all that. But doing an action movie is just fun on a whole other level. I spent three days on this movie where I was no longer an actor. I was just doing stunts. And you know, for those three days, I was like, “I’m a stuntman right now!” (laughs) I didn’t have any dialogue, nothing. It was crazy. One time they put me up in a harness and had me spin around and stuff. And I was like, “I’m not gonna do this unless you want Zhao to throw up.”

DAN: (laughs) It’s vomitbending! A new form of attack!

AASIF: Exactly. If he wants me to vomit fire, I’ll do it. But that was [just] one day. There were a lot of times when I was just jumpin’ around and gettin’ thrown here and there and it was just awesome. Kind of like when you’re a kid, jumpin’ off the garage. I just wish my body responded to all the running and jumping in the same way it did when I was a child and just bounced right back up again. When I didn’t need to go get a massage and sit in Epsom salts all night.

Part two of the interview coming soon in the next “It’s All Geek To Me”!