Romance is not dead, and A Nice Indian Boy is here to prove it. The film, directed by Roshan Sethi and starring his real-life partner Karan Soni (Deadpool), is a rom-com with a whole lot of family drama thrown into the mix thanks to a multifaceted screenplay by Eric Randall and the backbone of Madhuri Shekar’s original play. The story centers on an uptight doctor named Naveen (Soni) who falls for a more free-spirited photographer named Jay (Hamilton’s Jonathan Groff) after they meet cute at an Indian temple.

The only obstacles standing between the main pairing of A Nice Indian Boy is Naveen’s less-than-supportive parents (Harish Patel and Zarna Garg) and his own insecurities about having recently come out. Nevertheless, with the help of his sister Arundhathi (Sunita Mani) and their mutual affection, Naveen and Jay manage to bring the family together for a very necessary story full of heart and humor.

Screen Rant interviewed Sethi and Soni, alongside A Nice Indian Boy cast members Sunita Mani and Zarna Garg, while they were premiering their movie at SXSW. The energetic crew broke down the real-life parallels between Sethi and Soni’s relationship and the one depicted onscreen, gushed over the ease of filming romantic scenes with costar Jonathan Groff, and teased a few details about Deadpool & Wolverine.

Meet The Family At The Heart Of A Nice Indian Boy

Screen Rant: Roshan, you are the director behind this one. Can you can you set it up for us? Tell us a little bit about the premise and what drew you into it.

Roshan Sethi: The premise is that Karan’s character, who plays Naveen, brings home Jonathan Groff after falling in love with him to his crazy Indian family with his mom and sister, respectively behind me. He ends up going through a journey of acceptance and love with them, and it ends in a sort of crazy, gay Indian wedding.

The reason I took it on is because I’m gay and Indian, and I’m real life partners with Karan; we’re life and romantic partners, so it was a great way for us to tell a story that meant a lot to us personally, but was also fun and entertaining.

Karan, tell us a little bit about the unique challenges that Naveen presented to you.

Karan Soni: It was actually harder to play almost the straight character, for lack of a better word, because I like playing the louder and crazier character. But what was hard about this was that a lot of it is playing in just quiet moments, because he’s not expressing a lot until the end, where he literally expresses through dance.

But I think that’s always challenging because you’re like, “Is the camera picking up any of this?” You leave many days being like, “Did I do my job? Is any of it going to read?” But it’s the magic of film that, with everything, you can hopefully in the best case feel what this character is feeling even though he’s not expressing it outwardly very often.

Sunita and Zarna, can you guys tease your characters a little bit and tell us how they fit into the story?

Sunita Mani: I play Naveen’s sister, Arundhathi, and she’s serving boss bitch shackled by pressures – both her own, cultural, and familial. I think she’s really on the surface, which I like about her. You know what she’s feeling and thinking, yet she’s also so stifled by being able to actually feel and think her own thoughts. I liked that contradiction while having like a very confident character; I think it’s that’s an interesting thing to explore, and I know her very well.

I was drawn to that and drawn to this filmmaking team. I did this movie because they’re making it. I think we met we had a Zoom meeting; we hadn’t met before, but we had mutual connections. I’ve worked a little bit with Karan. But after that first meeting, I was just like, “I have to do [it]. Whatever happens, I want in.”

Zarna Garg: I play the mom in this movie. In many parts of the movie, I’m disappointed in my kids, which comes naturally to me. I have three kids, and I’m disappointed in them everyday. I think it was a very real life character. I have a very dumb, stupid, obtuse husband, who is also a very typical Indian man. This can’t get me canceled, right? He’s getting a massage right now, so he won’t know.

But it felt so real. It felt like a movie whose time has come. And of course, this team right here? Led by a doctor – what more could you want in your first movie? Jonathan Groff added that little extra spice. Singing in Hindi? The world is not prepared for that.

Sunita Mani: We’re calling him Jonathan Groff. He’s Jonathan Groff in the movie; not a character.

A Nice Indian Boy’s Star & Director Formed “An Emotional Throuple” With Jonathan Groff

Was that was that some added appeal: getting to marry Kristoff from Frozen?

Karan Soni: It was. We can’t imagine having done it with anyone but Jonathan. We’re a real life couple of them, and when you’re making a movie, you’re just hoping it gets made. So, you don’t think about all the weirdness that’s going to happen in a shoot potentially.

As it was in pre-production, I remember us talking on the phone and being like, “We’re about to shoot these scenes.” And he’s like, “Everyday, the crew is like, ‘Are you going to be okay when Karan proposes him, and when he marries him, and when they do the sex scene, or when they kiss?'” And we had just not thought about it, really, because we’re like, “How can we just get this movie made?”

And then as it was getting closer for me personally, I was like, “Oh, gosh, like this is a little bit weird that this is happening.” And then we met Jonathan, and we literally were both in love with him. I like to say we formed an emotional throuple. We truly feel like he’s our emotional third, and we couldn’t have done it with anyone else. Yeah, it was very easy to work with them.

There’s actually this long history in Hollywood of directors directing their significant others in romantic films. Roshan, can you speak a little bit more to that experience?

Roshan Sethi: I was so in doctor mode because I also work as a doctor, so I’m capable of retreating completely from real life and disappearing to some other place where I can be extremely objective. Because that’s what you do in the hospital. I did that, in a way when they were doing it. I wasn’t thinking at all of jealousy or any emotional reaction to what was happening. I was just completely in director mode. The only time that it became a little odd was the sex scene. That was a little weird, because I was directing the specifics of it to Jonathan and Karan, with the crew and the intimacy coordinator. The whole thing was really weird.

But again, I couldn’t have imagined it with anyone other than Jonathan, because it is actually impossible to be threatened by Jonathan. He’s the kindest, gentlest person. Everybody says it about him, and you assume that they’re just insincere things being said in press, but he is literally the nicest person in the world. And he acts in no way as if he’s aware of his fame or his many talents. He’s just so gentle and easy to be around, so he made that very easy.

You’re a doctor, and also a very successful film director. Do you have a very proud family?

Roshan Sethi: I think most of my family probably would have preferred that I remain in medicine. In the big scheme of things, I am not as successful as I could have been in medicine. It’s true that I am both a doctor and now directing, but I practice medicine for only nine weeks of the year. I cover basically consults, and I am 24/7 on call for oncology and end-of-life. It’s very different from making comedies, which is what I do the rest of the time, but I’ve always maintained that sort of double life.

Karan, the chemistry between you and Jonathan feels effortless, even when like it’s supposed to be a little bit awkward between you two at the beginning. Can you talk about what you guys did behind the scenes to achieve that?

Karan Soni: We didn’t really do anything. Having done a few things, it seems like if you like the other person as a person, you just hope the camera will pick it up. At least acting-wise, I’m never doing anything particularly specific, but it helps if you like the person. Then, if the writing is good and everything else is good, sometimes the scene naturally lends towards that. But I always feel that I don’t know if it’s going to be good or not until you watch it and you see it.

Roshan, Jonathan, and I had dinner about a year before we made the movie in New York. It was a four-hour dinner, and we were laughing like, “God, it would be really nice if we got to make this with him. And then cut to: he arrived and we went right into shooting.

I think the thing that really helped was the first scene we ever shot with him was when I bring him home. There was that awkwardness, and Jonathan had just gotten off a plane because he was doing Doctor Who. It wasn’t even 12 hours later that we were shooting that huge family scene with all of us and him coming, and I think the awkwardness of doing that first [helped]. If we had to do the proposal or something first, I think I would have been like, “Let’s figure this out. But I think because we started with that scene, I felt a little bit of an ease into getting to work with him. And then everything felt easy after that.

Roshan Sethi: It’s hard to explain, but Jonathan’s constantly connecting, and he’s totally present. He’s never on his phone, and it takes him three weeks to respond to a text, but if you’re sitting next to him in the cast room or the greenroom or anywhere? He is just locked in with you. That’s to anybody, so I think you guys built a very close connection very quickly in part because that is his nature to connect with people.

Sunita and Zarna, what was it like from your vantage points to watch this romance unfold in front of the camera?

Sunita Mani: It’s so magical, and I was trying to get in that throuple so hard. I was just loving it; loving it all. It felt like such a family. It really did, and there’s so many layers of personal stories going into all of it. It was actually just so easy and wonderful to kind of navigate all of it, because we’re all holding that, and we don’t have to spell it out for each other.

Zarna Garg: I think I wanted to be resistant at first, and it was part of the storyline. My son in the movie, Naveen, is a doctor also while Jay is an artist. I had to work on myself to be like, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s just a movie.” But because Jonathan is who he is, and he is so exceptionally charming, I think we got there very quickly.

Karan Soni: The only things Zarna doesn’t agree with Jonathan on – if I may say – is that he’s currently doing Broadway and theater. And she doesn’t think it’s lucrative enough, so she’s not okay with that life choice. But everything else is okay.

Replaying Real-Life Relationship Dynamic In A Nice Indian Boy

Early on in the film, Naveen says something along the lines of, “I don’t want to hear any sweeping notions of love. It’s 2024, the world is burning.” It really strikes a chord, but it also reminds you how much we need films like this. How important are films of love and joy right now?

Karan Soni: Yeah, it was improvised. It’s funny, because I’m doing a version of Roshan when we began dating. That’s what I fell in love with, but don’t worry, I started therapy and it’s all solved now. I’m just obsessed with playing versions of him, and there is a lot of that in there. Because when I met him, he was very much not into sentimentality. At one point, he almost wrote me an email that was in his drafts that he didn’t send, where he said, “I have to stop having emotions. Not everything needs to be attached to emotion.”

It was really fun in the beginning to play the character that way, because he’s a doctor. Bu that’s just the tip of the iceberg of things that were said to me, so it was nice to be able to channel it out. And I really was just performing for him, because I’m like, “I don’t know if anyone else is gonna find this funny, but he’s gonna get it.”

Roshan Sethi: I was very hardened in the beginning of our relationship, and then I softened very quickly. Because on the third date, I was like, “I had a premonition that I was going to marry you.” And I had – randomly for someone who was so scientific and so, frankly, robotic – I had had literally a premonition that I would marry him.

Now, the tables have turned to such an extent that I am constantly sentimental and soft. I trail behind him like a lost puppy, literally all day. And the person I was on that first date, I do not resemble in any way. If anything, it’s weird that we’ve switched places. I had just come out when I met Karan, so that process of letting it go and finding my inner softness was a really beautiful thing. And it’s reflected a little bit in the movie too.

Ryan Reynolds Is “Taking Advantage” Of Newly-Minted MCU Status In Deadpool & Wolverine

There’s a lot of Deadpool fans on Screen Rant, so I’ve got to ask you about it. The trailer for Deadpool 3 broke the internet, basically. Did you have a watch party for that?

Karan Soni: Nope! I didn’t even know it was coming. They’re not telling me anything, which is good. Honestly, to bring it back to Roshan, on our first date I recapped the plot of Deadpool 3, which I wasn’t supposed to. This was the Fox version, which didn’t get made because the studio got sold or whatever. But we just met, and I was desperate to impress him, and I just blurted the entire thing. I told him Hugh Jackman was gonna be in it – this was years before. All to say I didn’t get a script this time, thank God! They didn’t even tell me the trailer was coming out. I got to watch it when it came out, and I’m excited to be a small part of it.

Are you allowed to say what the version that didn’t get made was?

Karan Soni: Yes, I think it’s online a little bit, so I can. It was going to be originally a road trip movie where Deadpool tries to save Christmas, so we all go to the North Pole.

Can you talk about how the Deadpool 3 experience was any different?

Karan Soni: Yeah, it was. That was the first time in the MCU, and you really do feel like Ryan is taking advantage of that. I feel like everything gets made kind of at its time. Originally, we were gonna make that one years ago, and it would have been good. But I think this feels right, because the MCU is in a transition phase itself. I feel like they’re ready to make fun of some of the stuff, and the audience kind of wants that.

Definitely going into it with Kevin and everyone there, Ryan is definitely roasting all of it – the studio and all this stuff. I think it’s kind of coming at the right time, and they’re definitely giving it all the resources. There’s a lot of surprises and a lot of things that the audience doesn’t know about yet, so I think it’ll be a fun experience. And I hope people don’t spoil it as it gets closer, because I think it’ll be a fun experience to see the whole thing.

Source: Screen Rant Plus