South Asian actors gathered via Zoom to discuss the lack of South Asian respect and representation in the Hollywood film industry for an LBCC event. 

When asked if any of the speakers have had any racist or typecasting experiences, Ravi Kapoor, a British Actor, said, “Growing up in England it was in your face every day, you’d walk down the street and it was hard to get through a week without someone saying, ‘fuck off you paki,’ or ‘go home.’ That was the general kind of environment that I grew up in,” said Kapoor.

Kapoor said, “In terms of typecasting I’ve played a million freakin’ doctors, they should just give me a medical degree by this point because I’ve played so many doctors, there’s a little bit of a miopic view in the industry.”

Kapoor discussed his entrance to the acting scene and said, “I kinda knew around my mid teens that I really wanted to be an actor and a storyteller. When I was 18, I went to drama school in London and studied acting for 3 years and then started writing plays there in London.”

 Kapoor’s parents were first generation immigrants who moved to England to have a better life. “Seeing their child wanting to go into a profession that was unstable, it was difficult but they were also very encouraging at the same time. It was definitely a learning experience for all of us,” said Kapoor.

Meera Simhan, is a British actor who appeared in films like “Date Movie,” in which she played a stereotypical South Asian character. 

Simhan began her acting career in college. “When I started as an actor there were just so few of us, so few rules. It was a different landscape altogether and in the writing, there was more to be expressed, there was a story to tell… a story of me being South Asian.”

Simhan said that early on she was playing many doctors as well.

“I was playing mothers of terrorists or mothers of children who were either the murderer or victims of honor killings, mothers of terrorists or wives of terrorists,” said Simhan 

“I also, you know, want to work… the goal for me was to be able to fully realize these characters. Still these parts were being written through a different lens, not through the lens of the South Asian American experience but perhaps someone who isn’t South Asian writing about what they want to see and how they see us.

Simhan continued to speak on microaggressions she faced in the workplace. 

“So there was one movie I worked on and it was a comedy. It was kind of a big movie, it was the first scene that I was in and they’re like, ‘Great! Thicker accent!’ And then they’d come back to me and they’re like, ‘Great, even bigger, thicker accent.’ And I take a breath every time and I just couldn’t do it and everything in my body stopped me from putting on this caricature of this Indian mother that was wanted,” said Simhan.

Simjan continued and said, “I think it was at least five or six times where they’re like, ‘bigger, thicker, thicker.’ And I couldn’t even do it because everything in my body was resisting it. Because to them it was funny.”

Fawzia Mirza, who started off as a lawyer and became an actor, mentioned how hard it is to be considerate towards races and racial issues in the acting industry. 

“Those small guest star roles on shows that were coming through or these commercials, you were basically like a generic brown person. That was a really common thing, either you were South Asian or Mexican or insert any sort of Latinx here, if you could fit the look you were all kind of cattle called in,” said Mirza. 

Mirza said, “Those questions of ‘Do I take the job or not?’ It’s so much easier outside of it to say, “Well don’t do it.” Yeah well how am I going to feed my family? How am I going to get the next job? How am I going to have a career in this industry,” said Mirza. 

Lastly, speakers were asked about the importance of being able to write their own stories, Simhan responded, “What compelled me to write my own story was because there’s a fully realized, full human being here and the more we write characters of color that are empowering and fully realized. So then when they see a person who looks like people on tv… they see them as another human being.”