E-Paper
Mother promise: How Poorna Jagannathan became TV’s best mum
For Poorna Jagannathan, fame was never the end goal. Now that she’s tasted success, playing a feisty mom on Never Have I Ever, she’s realigning her priorities
Poorna Jagannathan is surprised to learn that IMDB lists 53 projects to her credit, given that she debuted only in 2004. “I read that and it just hit me,” says the 50-year-old actor, laughing. Even the two-decade-long journey has been riddled with pauses. “Most of my career, there were like two tiny projects a year. There was no pace; it was a snail’s pace. There were no roles for women who look like me,” she says.
Until her runaway Netflix hit Never Have I Ever, which concluded with a fourth season in June, few viewers knew Jagannathan. She’d had a breakthrough role in the HBO miniseries The Night Of (2016), in which she played Safar Khan, a Pakistani in New York, whose son is wrongly accused of murder. She’d shone in smaller but potent roles in Delhi Belly (2011), Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (2013), and Big Little Lies (2017-’19) and Better Call Saul (2015-’22).
Never Have I Ever, then, is the surprise jewel in the crown. Jagannathan plays Nalini, the widowed, grieving mother to precocious teenage Devi (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). In a show about high schoolers dealing with heartbreaks and hormones, that relationship forms the softer core, making Nalini the spine of the narrative. Their chemistry is one for the history books: “Pray you get into Princeton,” Nalini tells Devi in Season One. “Don’t waste your prayers on stupid things like world peace.”
On the show, created by Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher, Jagannathan plays an obsessive Type-A mother, but departs from the lazy caricatures that usually make up Brown moms on screen. Nalini acknowledges her desires when she has a fling with a fellow doctor . She has ambitions and values outside of her position as a mother. In the later seasons, she supports her niece-in-law Kamala and her mother-in-law Nirmala in their endeavours to find love.
So, it’s not surprising that Jagannathan talks about Nalini with the kind of gentleness and endearment one saves for their best friend. Playing Nalini taught her to be more patient and understanding with her own son, Anav, who, at 17, is only a year younger than Devi on the show. “I hope it’s not my peak. I feel like we’ve all been given the opportunity to start as a community, and there are stories, in whose telling we are only now taking central positions. But this has just started four years ago, not even five,” she says.
Colour codes
Jagannathan tips her hat to Kaling, and Bela Bajaria, the chief content officer at Netflix since 2016, as two forces driving this change. “South Asian women have always been left behind in terms of being fleshed-out characters,” she says. “They show up as paper thin on the page.” Kaling’s comedy series, The Mindy Project (2012-2017) was the first major American show with a Brown woman in the lead. It did away with cracks about curry, arranged marriages and desi tropes.
Mom roles however took time to change. (Scroll down for the box at the end of this story.) “Not to diss South-Asian men, but the portrayal of the Indian mother has either been written by White men or Brown men, and it’s been shallow at best, and ridiculous at worst,” Jagannathan says. “It makes me think, ‘Wow, you have really never stopped to ask anything to your mother, have you?’”
Being on Never Have I Ever also helped Jagannathan see the “absurd side of being a mother”, both in reel and real life. “Nalini never tries to be funny,” she says. “A mother will say something in a situation, and it’s f*cking absurd. The fact that that’s what they thought to say in that situation is what makes it funny.” In one episode, Nalini frantically scolds Devi for dropping a textbook that had been consecrated in their home temple. “That textbook has been blessed. If it touches the ground, I have to take it back to the priest. I don’t have the time to go to Rancho Cucamonga today!”
Craft work
The actor says she was nervous about preparing to play Nalini. So she turned to Gina Rodriguez, aka Jane from Jane the Virgin (2014-’19). Rodriguez played a young woman, impregnated by an accidental artificial insemination. Her performance, Jagannathan finds, is a lesson in comedic pace and timing. “As a viewer, it feels like the comedy unfolds in real time. But the truth is that the humour is just very quick,” she says. “And the voice of God is the narrator, like it is in Never Have I Ever. So Gina was a huge inspiration, because she is very, very natural.”
It was only after the show was out that Jagannathan found out about that Rodriguez was a fan of Never Have I Ever in return. “Lilly Singh had invited us to her Diwali party last year, and Gina was hoping to catch sight of any cast member. It was love at first sight, and we have become friends,” she says.
Critics have loved Nalini. In a review of the final season, Film Companion said the actress’s portrayal was “pitch perfect” as it is in “every season”. Vulture called the actor “typically fantastic” as a loving, caring mother, who often butts heads with her daughter.
It’s made Jagannathan conscious of what she represents. She’s been trying to make her characters as South-Asian as possible – names, clothes, little details. She also is mindful of using every opportunity to amplify other South-Asian talent. In the comedy-adventure film The Out-Laws, which was released in the US last month, Jagannathan plays a mobster. She drew costume director Jordanna Fineberg’s attention to Indian designers Gaurav Gupta and Falguni & Shane Peacock and wears an ensemble from the duo in the film.
That IMDB list is set to grow. In one of her upcoming untitled projects, Jaggannathan co-stars with George Clooney and Brad Pitt. In another upcoming film, Goodrich, she’ll appear alongside Mila Kunis and Michael Keaton. “I can tell you that all four of them are just as hot and nice as we think they are,” she reassures, with a laugh.
At 50, Jagannathan is fearless in a way she may not have been before too. “The thirties and forties were about raising my child. The fifties are about being more courageous with my career choices now that I can take on projects that take me away from home for more than a couple of weeks or months,” she says. “It’s a new phase of life for women, and not the end of their story.”
(Jagannathan spoke to HT Brunch before the SAG-AFTRA strike)
Another mother: Screen moms who escaped the parent trap
Gloria Pritchett in Modern Family (2009-’20)
Colombia-born Gloria is more than the sexy second wife. She’s a whip-smart, and a wonderfully sensitive mother to her son Manny from her first marriage, who has trouble fitting into his American life. Played by Sofia Vergara.
Penélope Alvarez in One Day At a Time (2017-’20)
Lupe is a US Army veteran, in therapy for depression and anxiety. She’s is also a full-time nurse, a separated wife and a mother of two. Not quite your Latina mom, she’s supportive when her daughter comes out as gay. Played by Justina Machado.
Rainbow Johnson in Black-ish (2014-’22)
Bow is an African-American anaesthesiologist and a protective mother of five. She’s a little vain (she once forgot about a medical emergency because she was TikToking), but is quirky and unafraid of missteps. Played by Tracee Ellis Ross.
Muneeba Khan in Ms. Marvel (2022)
A rebel in her youth in Pakistan, she reveals her softer core to meet her superhero daughter Kamala halfway. The two lock horns, but are secretly proud of each other’s sacrifices for the greater and smaller good. Played by Zenobia Shroff.
Jessica Huang in Fresh Off the Boat (2015-’20)
Jessica takes no prisoners, not even with her three children whom she describes as “never too old to be controlled”. Born in Taiwan, and growing up in a Chinatown, in the US, she equal parts hustler, lover and fighter. Played by Constance Wu.
