Kumail Nanjiani is Mad That Only White Guys Can Be Villains

Movies

Can you go too woke for the woke? Of course you can; they wouldn’t be woke otherwise. The newest example of these people never being satisfied even when they’re unfailingly catered to comes from Kumail Nanjiani. Nanjiani was in the Marvel film Eternals, which I won’t hold against him, but he was also in Silicon Valley, The Big Sick, and Obi-Wan Kenobi. In an interview with Esquire about his part in the Hulu series Welcome to Chippendale’s, Nanjiani, who is Pakistani-American, lamented that he’d love to play a villain, but Hollywood is only interested in casting white men in those roles. Here is the excerpt:

“‘I think that Hollywood now – even though they’re trying to be more diverse – is still weird,’ the actor says. The problem, Nanjiani wagers, is that good intentions can sometimes lead to misguided solutions: if the bad guy is a brown guy, what message is that sending? ‘And that’s just as limiting as anything else,’ he says. ‘I want to play more bad guys.’ Nanjiani would like a career as varied as his Marvel stablemate Sebastian Stan, who can flit from superhero to serial killer (Nanjiani watched Fresh, in which Stan plays a charming, organ-harvesting cannibal). ‘He does these big Marvel movies, and then he’ll play a psychopath. I was told that’s going to be hard because people don’t want to cast non-white people as bad guys.’”

This is why you don’t try to appease the woke; they’re never happy. White men are always the villains because studios are afraid of being called racist for portraying anyone else as evil. For some reason, the second a member of any other group is the bad guy, it’s an indictment of the entire group rather than just a character in a film. In the 90s, gay advocacy groups were angry about Basic Instinct, and after 9/11, studios were in such a rush to appear sensitive that the terrorists in the big-screen adaptation of Tom Clancy’s novel The Sum of All Fears were changed from Palestinians (who, in the book, had a network of accomplices that included a German scientist and even a Native American) to Neo-Nazis – which, of course, negated the title. An episode of Family Guy had a great gag about a “multi-racial TV gang,” poking fun at Hollywood pushing against the reality that criminal groups are often divided among racial lines. But now, that’s racist too, and someone as outspoken as Kumail Nanjiani is going to pretend that he wouldn’t be first in line to rail against a movie with a non-white villain because all of a sudden, he wants his Hans Gruber. It’s not that I think the sentiment he’s expressing is wrong; I just don’t buy his sincerity for a moment, and this is a result of the atmosphere wokesters have created, where everyone is scared to death of wandering off the reservation.

Although Marvel’s next big villain, Kang the Conqueror, is being played by a black guy; maybe times are changing.