Yes, My Accent Is Real (24 page)

He makes up stories in his head.

All the time.

He is playing and fighting invisible foes.

He is growing and spinning and trying and failing.

He feels not so much like a little boy.

He wants to be a man.

He wants to flex his muscles and intimidate the weak.

He wants to protect his woman and take on the world.

He wants to make money

And be famous

And make more money

And be handsome

And have many

Cars

And

Lovers

And

Houses

And

Maybe

A plane.

Just one.

One day he would like a little boy of his own.

A boy he creates with his woman.

So he can tell his own little boy

That

The little boy will always have

A little boy inside him, too.

And that little boy

Will always be afraid of the dark

And of monsters and bears and lions.

Someday he will grow,

But

A part of him

Will always just

Be

A little boy.

Just

Like

Him.

K. N.

April 2, 2012

Laurel Canyon

Los Angeles, CA

Sometimes fans of the show will approach me and they'll want me to be smart. It's always awkward when I let them down gently and explain that, in fact, I am only an actor who is playing an astrophysicist. This just crushes some people. They want me to
be
Raj. One guy asked me, “Hey, what do you think about the Higgs boson particle? Now we can finally prove that dark matter exists!”

“I'm sorry, I don't speak English very well, but I'm with you,” I said.

The only smart thing I know is that eight glasses of water a day is too much water.

Mints. I am addicted to mints. When you're doing scenes with fellow actors and speaking into their face, ideally, you don't want your breath to smell like fish. So, to compensate for my fear of bad
breath, I think I have consumed about three and a half million Altoids on the set of
Big Bang.

Actually, I can do the math:

On average I consume 2 Altoids an hour.

Each workday is 10 hours.

Each week we have 5 workdays.

Every episode takes 1 week to film.

Every season has 24 episodes.

We have done 8 seasons.

2 x 10 x 5 x 1 x 24 x 8 = 19,200 Altoids

It's not a secret that everyone in the
Big Bang
cast is a Ping-Pong fanatic. We have three tables on set and the games are ferociously competitive. Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting is a very good Ping-Pong player. Mark Cendrowski, our director, is excellent. And I
think
I'm the best. Kaley plays like a jackhammer, smashing the ball back at you. (She's just like Addy, my old badminton rival, except way hotter.) My style is more smooth and silky—more finessey.

We staged tournaments on set that became so intense, so competitive, that we literally had to shut the operation down last year. People were getting injured. Someone dove for a ball and tore their ACL, one of the guys ran into a ladder and needed rotator cuff surgery, we had a lot of cuts and bruises, and once I sprained my ankle. We even started challenging other TV shows; we took on Kelsey Grammer's sitcom
Back to You
. I would tell you who won but I am sworn to secrecy.
^I

I constantly hear people say, “I like that show, but it needs to stop using a laugh track.” Now hear this: WE DON'T USE A LAUGH TRACK. The laughter is real, from a real live audience. I know this because I am there every single day of my life. In the same way that theater actors, stand-up comedians, and musicians perform in front of a live audience, that's how we do it. And we love it because it gives us instant feedback.

On the contrary, we do have to occasionally
remove
laughter from the audio track, as the most devoted fans in the live audience, at times, know the characters so well that they anticipate the joke and giggle before it happens. When this happens, we off them. Just kidding. We give them a warning and if they do it again,
then
we off them. Really, we love our fans and it's such a blessing to see so many people connect with the show. We don't take this for granted.

Before I played Raj, I had no idea that there really is such a thing as pathological shyness. It's a diagnosed psychological condition, and yes, it really can lead to selective mutism, the reason for Raj's inability to speak to women. I've received heartwarming letters from parents of children suffering from the condition, and who said, “Thank you for being the voice of selective mutism.” (And the irony of that statement was not lost on me.)

For me, the real problem with my character having selective mutism on
The Big Bang Theory
is that it has meant that Raj has
to drink so much alcohol. When I drink those grasshopper “martinis,” they're actually made from water, cream, and a heavy splash of green food coloring. After a tape night, I literally poop green for, like, three days.

I'm as big a fan of the show as anybody you'll ever meet. I love
Big Bang
. I love playing Raj. Each week, we get the new script on Tuesday night after we finish taping. Whenever I get a new script, I can't wait to tear it open and see what our writers have in store for us. Every Tuesday night feels like Christmas morning.

And then craft services adds another thirty. The truth is that when you're on set, there's unlimited food at your disposal, always, everywhere. Nothing but M&Ms and chocolate bars and cookies and cake, because the entire industry runs on sugar and carbs and Coca-Cola.

Here's how the Emmys, SAG Awards, and Golden Globes really work: We all get dressed up and apply makeup and stand sweating on the red carpet, and a few hours later, the 99 percent of us who don't go home as winners are so miserable that we drink ourselves into a stupor, and then, several more hours later, when the party is over we all go outside and wait in the valet line for our limos. It's always a chaotic forty-five-minute wait, with parking attendants
using bullhorns to call out limo numbers. We're all just sitting, sometimes lying down on the pavement, waiting for our cars. Even the award-winning actors are rubbing their feet, tired and cranky, holding their statues in one hand, iPhones in the other, trying to pull as many strings as they can to get their car ahead in the limo line. “
You said five minutes twenty minutes ago!
” We are all equals in that moment. The biggest stars look like the most petty kids, cutting in line, pushing each other out of the way, screaming at parking attendants. It's like a riot with the most beautifully dressed protestors in the world.

This has taken me some time to learn. Given my theater background, I was used to playing things BIG. You can't go small in theater. You have to really physicalize every emotion, because the guy in the twenty-fifth row simply can't see a subtle twitching of your lip. On TV? You're practically zoomed into the actor's nostrils. It took me a few years—maybe until season four, if I'm being totally honest—to stop forcing it. You don't need to sell the joke. When the writing is as good as ours, just trust it; just say the words and the joke will sell itself.

You always hear about someone meeting their idol . . . and then discovering they're not how they'd imagined them to be. It's like how I felt when I met Stephen Hawking: total prick. KIDDING. Actually, he's the best example of the point I'm trying to make. On
Big Bang
, I've been lucky to meet so many of my idols—Stan Lee,
James Earl Jones, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, Stephen Hawking, so many others—and they've been lovely and charming and wonderful. But the cool thing is that I've seen them as
human being
s, and rather than knock them off their pedestal, that just makes them even more amazing. We sit side by side in the makeup room and make small talk about this and that, and you realize that we are all just working. They're working, and you're working, and like all human beings, we just show up to work and we do our jobs.

When I met Stephen Hawking I knew that I was in the presence of a great man, and I felt bad, at first, that Howard was doing a Stephen Hawking impression
right in front of him.
Were we being dicks? I thought maybe, but then I saw that Dr. Hawking was smiling, and later I heard that he enjoyed the rehearsal so much, in fact, that he went back home and reread the script. I've also heard that Stephen Hawking likes to party with strippers, but I didn't bring that up with him.

One of Raj's idiosyncrasies is that he has selective mutism, so in scenes during a taping, I'll whisper into the ears of the male characters, who then, in turn, vocalize my thoughts to women. Do I mess with the other actors when I'm whispering, trying to crack them up?

The truth is that I don't. We always say that we're very serious about our funny. The language on our show is very specific, almost like a poem, and we don't do any ad-libbing at all. If you mess with
someone you can break his or her rhythm. That said, I'm the absolute worst on the show about breaking character and cracking up laughing. I'll even start laughing at my own jokes, even before I get to the punch li—Bwahaha. Hooohaha. HAHAHA!

Yeah, I'm even annoying myself right now.

This is not to say that I'm “famous.” I'm not. Or maybe I am. I don't care either way. Let's just say I'm
popular.
But when I started to get noticed after season three—the year we went into syndication—I realized that, as a TV personality, because I am in someone's living room each and every night, people feel like they already know me.

When a show plays in a family's living room several times a week, it's part of family time between parents and kids and cousins and grandparents. It's a familiar thing that's almost part of your house, like a couch or a jar of mayonnaise in the back of the fridge. So when people see me walking on the street, they feel like we're old pals. Women pull my cheeks and men clap me on the shoulder; I'm like a little petting zoo. But
movie stars
, on the other hand, are much more
untouchable
. Those are people that you watch from afar. They're regal lions. I'm a friendly goat.

Obviously I'm supposed to say something humble like, “Aw, shucks, I'm just happy to do my job, and I don't even pay attention to things like getting recognized in public, or being asked to sign autographs, or having lots of Twitter followers. None of that
matters compared to the Work.” The truth is that all of that is incredibly fun. Anyone who says otherwise is either a liar or a Cylon.

I enjoy that stuff because:

1. It's an appreciation of my work. As a professional actor, this gives me pride. I'm happy when my work makes others happy.

2. I recognize that this might be fleeting. Who knows where my career will take me. Maybe people won't recognize me anymore when
Big Bang
ends. Maybe there's a career lull. Maybe I'll be hit by a bus or die of an Altoids overdose or be sent to prison, finally convicted for the time that I
please set the as a couple of lines of redacted text, as though crossed out with a black marker.
We never know where life will take us. So I'm trying to follow my father's advice and enjoy the life I have, and to love with a big heart.

I
. We won.

“SHE'S AN EX–MISS INDIA. YOU
need to meet her,” said my cousin.

“Ex? Can't you
introduce me to the current one?” I joked.

The woman in question was an actual beauty queen. Her name was Neha. In 2006 she won the title of Miss India, and represented our country in the Miss Universe pageant. She was a fashion model. She was trained in classical dance. I was back home for Christmas in New Delhi, visiting friends and family. My cousin and this beauty queen happened to have a friend in common. They talked me up to her:
He's this great guy from America, he's an actor, you should meet him.
For an entire week they tried to get her to visit my parents' house—the same house I grew up in—but for one reason or another, she could never make it.