When “Deli Boys” first started production, star Saagar Shaikh expected the Hulu series — which follows two pampered brothers who take the reins of their dad’s empire of drug-front convenience stores — to feel akin to darker fare like “Breaking Bad” or “Succession.” Instead, the Onyx Collective series dialed up the laughs, blending genres to lock into its distinct tone.
“There is so much heart to the show. There’s so much drama to it, but all of it is seasoned with comedy all over the place,” Shaikh, who stars in “Deli Boys” alongside Asif Ali and Poorna Jagannathan, told TheWrap for our latest digital cover.
“We started off as ‘Succession,’ and then we ended up as ‘Three Stooges,’” Jagannathan added, noting “for context” that creator Abdullah Saeed was behind a series called “Bong Appétit,” where he hosted extravagant cannabis-infused meals. “I’ve never been given a carte blanche on this level of physical comedy, or comedy in general, and it occupies a very certain tone. ‘Deli Boys’ is inter-genre — it cannot be categorized as a comedy or a drama.”
In “Deli Boys,” Shaikh and Ali star as Raj and Mir, respectively, a pair of Pakistani American brothers who enjoy the fruits of their dad’s (Iqbal Theba) labor — he established himself as a corporate magnate by franchising a number of delis after immigrating to the U.S. Mir and Raj’s reality quickly comes crashing down, however, when their Baba dies and they are are initiated into the real family business — trafficking drugs — by their auntie, Lucky (Jagannathan).
When Ali, who has had roles in “Agatha All Along” and “Shrinking,” first read the script for “Deli Boys,” he recalled being struck by the majority of South Asian characters on the show. “Usually it’s just one brown person … so when I read this, I was like, ‘Oh, it’s all brown people!’”
But it was the comedic core of “Deli Boys” that sealed the deal for Ali.
“There’s a lot of shows … I call them ‘thesis statement shows’ where they’re … talking about the culture and trying to bridge that gap, but this show was what I wanted — just straight up funny comedy in a crazy world,” Ali said.
Ali plays Mir, whose strait-laced, type-A personality clashes with his brother’s laid-back vibe as they fast-track the corporate ladder to run the family business, though Ali revealed he first auditioned for Raj before the role went to Shaikh. “I wouldn’t say that I’m a super type A, planner type guy, but it’s fun to play difficult people … to me, it’s much more exciting to play somebody who’s super pent up and needs everything to be perfect, because there’s so much conflict there.”
Ali’s on-screen brother is Shaikh, whose portrayal of Raj felt rather close to home. “I grew up in a gas station family,” Shaikh said, adding his dad worked at a Diamond Shamrock for a decade before saving enough to buy a Shell gas station. “And then three years after that, he bought two more. We were kids at the time, and he couldn’t handle three stores, so then he sold one. And then one kept getting robbed, so he ended up selling that one. He’s just had that one store ever since.”
Shaikh explained he “was the Raj in that situation” after only working at the gas station for a summer, while his older brother has been working there since he was 13 while also pursuing a career in local politics. “My dad’s dream was to pass this on to us, and for us to build more on it,” Shaikh said, noting that he majored in business on his dad’s advice. “I was the only one that was like, ‘This isn’t it for me.’”
Since he’s well-versed in the front-facing part of the job, Shaikh said the experience of playing Raj felt “full circle” and “cathartic” for him. “I already understood the idea of, ‘This is great that my dad owns a store …. I’m not going to do anything about it, right?,’” he said. Shaikh noted that he FaceTimed his dad from the “Deli Boys” set, and his dad quickly offered to sell any leftover merchandise at his store.
While Ali noted that neither he nor Shaikh grew up with an immigrant father who becomes a business magnate like Mir and Raj’s father in “Deli Boys,” he singled out the “irony” that reaching that level of corporate success is the goal of “every immigrant father.”
“They love Donald Trump,” Jagannathan added.
Though the stakes of navigating the drug trade and local mafia couldn’t be higher for Mir and Raj as they fight for the empire their father built (and their lives), Ali noted the pressure to succeed resonates with all sorts of immigrant children. “Every immigrant kid [wonders], ‘Am I validating or living up to the sacrifice that my parents made coming over here? Am I taking advantage of these opportunities?’” Ali said. “Our characters [are] thrown into the worst possible version of that, and then just … flail and figure it out.”
For Jagannathan, whose “mission in life” is to tell immigrant stories, “Deli Boys” is the first project that aids her in telling “the flip side of the modern minority story of the un-modern minority,” noting “there’s so many of us that just are not spoken about, and don’t have a voice and are never portrayed.”
After playing mothers on Mindy Kaling’s “Never Have I Ever” and Riz Ahmed-led “The Night Of,” Jagannathan said portraying Lucky, Mir and Raj’s badass auntie who guides them through the crime-filled business, was “liberating.” “I’m going from playing characters who cook rice, dal [and] sabzi, to a character that cooks cocaine, and it couldn’t be a more seamless transition,” Jagannathan said.
“I love the characters I’ve played and I relate to them, but it’s a deep and specific understanding of who you could be, not who you are or who you were,” Jagannathan said of the “Deli Boys” script that she felt was meant for her. “Abdullah got it, and he told me later on … he had seen me play a lot of doting mothers and … he was like, ‘What if she was a killer?’”
While Lucky most often kicks ass in leather or fur — Jagannathan joked that Lucky “has a lot to carry on her shoulders, and so therefore they are very, very padded” — Jagannathan revealed that as the season goes on, she thinks her character is based on showrunner Michelle Nader, who juggles “Deli Boys” with showrunning duties on the hit ABC sictcom “Shifting Gears.”
“[She] has to walk into rooms full of men and navigate being underestimated in every room all the time. It is what women are up against most of the time,” Jagannathan said.
Jagannathan also noted that “Deli Boys” takes the trope of a deli boy that America has seen on TV for years — Apu on “The Simpsons” — and flips it on its head. “Apu was not written for us or by us, or voiced by us. It had nothing to do with us,” Jagannathan said. “It was a caricature of a South Asian behind a counter. No one stopped to ask what their story is … the transition from what Apu was, which is a punchline in ‘The Simpsons,’ into a plot line was really moving.”
“Deli Boys” falls in line with the goal of Onyx Collective president Tara Duncan to create “ordinary stories,” Jagannathan said. “What she means by that is, it’s not the saga of an immigrant experience and finding yourself and all that. It’s just a funny, ordinary story, it could have been any ethnicity telling the story,” Jagannathan said.
While Jagannathan sees “Deli Boys” as a “universal story,” she said the Hulu series adds specificities from South Asian and Pakistani culture, from how the characters pray and eat to their relationships with one another. “The only reason the nuances exist in the show is because we happen to be brown. We brought those nuances to it,” Shaikh said. “But if it was anybody else, any other ethnicity, playing these roles, it would have been the same show with different nuances.”
Though the series has not received a Season 2 renewal just yet, Ali, Shaikh and Jagannathan are keeping their fingers crossed for a chance to take their characters for another spin.
“You make a show to live and create a world that’s much bigger so you can continue going back to these characters,” Ali said. “The spaces that we get into in the season of popping into all these different types of mobs and all these parts of the city, and then our individual back stories — the world really is so big that they’ve created with the show.”
All episodes of “Deli Boys” are now streaming on Hulu.
