written by erika janes photographed by jessica chou
As the actress says goodbye to the Netflix series Never Have I Ever, she opens up about stepping into powerful roles as an Indian-American actress and nearing the empty-nest stage of parenting.
Poorna Jagannathan
Is Embracing The
unexpected
There’s a scene in the series finale of Never Have I Ever, the acclaimed Mindy Kaling– and Lang Fisher–created Netflix series about an Indian-American teenager’s coming of age, where Poorna Jagannathan’s character finally lets go. As the mother of the dramedy’s main character, Devi, Jagannathan’s Dr. Nalini Vishwakumar has been grieving her husband’s death since the show’s very first episode. And then, in the last one, she takes off her thaali, the traditional necklace that Hindu women wear when they get married and customarily don’t remove until the 10th day of mourning following their husband’s death.
Letting go of the old to make room for the new isn’t just the culmination of Dr. Nalini Vishwakumar’s character arc; it’s a storyline that's applicable to the 50-year-old Jagannathan’s own life right now. Never Have I Ever, the show that cemented her status as a TV star after two decades of steadily working in the business, has ended its award-winning run after four seasons. And not unlike her character reconciling the fact that her daughter is going to Princeton at the show’s end, Jagannathan is preparing for her own empty-nest phase as her 17-year-old son Anav enters his senior year of high school this fall.
Jagannathan is holding close the whole NHIE experience — what it has meant to her personally and professionally — but she’s ready for what’s next. Relaxing in the quiet of her Los Angeles home while talking to SheKnows over Zoom, she references a line her character says toward the end of the season: “I know, it’s scary — our lives are changing. But change is good. Change is necessary.”
Almost an Empty-Nester
As a parent, Jagannathan didn’t initially see herself in the character of Nalini. “She parents in a different way from how I parent,” she told PBS’ Amna Nawaz in an interview earlier this spring. “She’s super strict. Lots of boundaries.” Expanding upon that, she tells SheKnows, “My partner is a very, very present dad. And so my role as a mom — it's always been the emotional bedrock for my son. It's different from Nalini. But as the seasons went on and as Devi started transforming and as Nalini started changing, the storyline became so much closer to who I am in real life.”
The parallels are there of course, especially with fictional Devi heading off to Princeton and very real Anav starting to think about college. “But the thing that's taught me the most about parenting is not so much what was happening inside the script, it was what was happening after the show aired,” she says. “I've mentioned this a couple of times, but when [the show] came out, what I was really struck by is just kids' responses to it; like, ‘Oh, I've never heard my parents say I'm proud of you. I've never heard I love you.’ Especially the South Asian community. Especially immigrant moms, we're not taught to be that expressive . . . So I really shifted my parenting from being even less goal-oriented to just making sure I'm communicating to my son or doing whatever I need to do with my son to give him a sense of belonging.”
Jagannathan has talked about this scene in interviews before, and with good reason: It was a pivotal moment for her as an actress, and a deeply personal one rooted in her own mother’s experience. Jagannathan didn’t just act the scene, she collaborated on its entire existence. “There's a whole thaali removing ceremony that goes on,” she explains. “And when my own dad died, I just remember my mother never took hers off for a couple of years. When she was ready, she took it off . . . We kept having these conversations every season, like, ‘Is this the time [to remove it]?’ and we just kept it on,” she says. “And then in season four, I really felt like it’d be a beautiful symbolic gesture.”
Years in the making, it’s a brief moment on screen that’s deeply touching — to see Nalini, at her own mother’s wedding and on the eve of sending her daughter off to college, literally removing a tie to her old life.
“Season four was all about letting go for Nalini,” Jagannathan says. “Not only letting go of Devi, but letting go of her grief. Letting go of the older version of her life and inviting a newer one in.”
“ . . . I really shifted my parenting from being even less goal-oriented to just making sure I'm communicating to my son or doing whatever I need to do with my son to give him a sense of belonging.”
Poorna Jagannathan
T
Last year, when she was upgrading her phone, she gave Anav her old one. “For 24 hours, we both had the same iCloud,” she explains. “And so at 4:00 PM on Saturday, all his texts and pictures came to my phone. It was the worst.” It was also, as probably every parent reading this can imagine, incredibly eye-opening. “It was just like, God, there's so much life being lived by these teenagers,” she says. “You have no idea what's happening. But we're close enough that over time it becomes a huge source of . . .” she pauses. “You just learn to live with these new boundaries all the time. You learn to live with: ‘As long as they're not harming themselves and harming others.’ And your boundaries just become less and less to raise a teen.”
Jagannathan is enjoying the perks of parenting an older kid, too. Anav has his driver’s license; on a day when they visited a museum and Jagannathan made the mistake of wearing heels, she had the realization that instead of hobbling back to the car, she could simply have him pick her up. “The liberation with the driving situation has been unbelievable,” she says.
All joking aside, it's a pivotal time when you start receiving lessons from your kids. “I think that's where the real joy of parenting happens,” Jagannathan says. “When your kid presents you with obstacles and ordeals and things you've never expected, good and bad . . . You have to change who you think you are,” she says. “You have to let go of strong-held beliefs in order to meet them where they are in a non-judgmental way. And I think that the most amount of growing I have ever done is in these teen years.”
“You learn to live with: As long as they're not harming themselves and harming others. And your boundaries just become less and less to raise a teen.”
Poorna Jagannathan
“I think that the most amount of growing I have ever done is in these teen years.”
Poorna Jagannathan
Jagannathan may still be growing as a parent, but from an outside perspective, “her relationship with her son is mother-child #goals,” according to her NHIE co-star Richa Moorjani. “I’ve seen how much respect Anav has for his mom, and it’s really incredible to see,” she says. “I think it’s because she just gives him the space to be himself, while always being there to guide him and love him unconditionally.”
“I grew up with James Bond movies, and for me, the villain was always the most attractive component of that movie,” she says (although we’re guessing she might not have shared that sentiment with her co-star Brosnan, an actual James Bond.) But it was actually Christoph Waltz’s character in Inglourious Basterds who helped inspire her own villainous portrayal in Deli Boys, in particular — a villain who has so much power that he doesn’t need to broadcast it. “My character in Deli Boys is just so powerful that [I] get to play against it,” she explains. “You don't see South Asian women in [roles that are] positions of power in general. And to play a gangster, you have to have so much power that you don't even care if you're losing it. You have so much power in the bank, it's not a big deal.”
Such roles aren’t usually “something that’s afforded to women like me,” she says, referencing not just the color of her skin but her age, and she’s delighting in the opportunities. “Suddenly I'm in this new era,” she says, adding that even five years ago, her acting career would likely have transitioned back to supporting roles. Instead, “it's totally the reverse. I'm not only going into these meaty, fantastic roles, I'm playing a gangster across the board.”
Jagannathan credits Hollywood bigwigs like Kaling and Shonda Rhimes for leading the way in creating strong roles for women of color; with Deli Boys, she credits series creator Abdullah Saeed with wanting to create a character who was a tribute to his own strong single mom. Still, she muses that her character might have originally been male. As for her role in The Out-Laws, it was written for another actor whose schedule didn’t work out. “I have no idea what hand of God happened in that situation, but I auditioned many, many, many times,” she admits. “It's written a very particular way, in a very particular sense of humor that when I read it, I immediately understood the world that it lived in. I think they just didn't expect to go with someone like me.”
Taking On New Roles
Professionally, Jagannathan is still growing, too. Having moved well beyond the point in her career where she was limited to ‘supportive brown friend’ roles that prop up someone else’s story (“Oh my God, so many of those,” she laments), she’s reached a place where the characters she’s playing are juicy, complex, and unexpected — like gangsters. In the Adam Sandler-produced Netflix film The Out-Laws, which began streaming on July 7 and stars Pierce Brosnan and Ellen Barkin, she plays a crime boss who “just hasn't gotten over the fact that [Pierce Brosnan’s character] hasn't chosen her to be his lifelong gangster partner. And she's just very trigger-happy and completely cuckoo.” In the forthcoming Hulu series Deli Boys, she plays Lucky, the matriarch of a crime family — “a total auntie” who happens to be running “the biggest cocaine business on Earth.” Did we mention they’re both comedies?
Jagannathan’s success in defying expectations is even more impressive considering she didn’t start acting until her mid-30s. Conquering Hollywood isn’t exactly most people’s Plan B — and it wasn’t Jagannathan’s, either — but she had an entire career in advertising before devoting herself to acting full time.
After attending college in both Brazil and Maryland, she applied to — and got rejected from — roughly 30 different acting programs. “I auditioned so much,” she says. “I didn't know how to act but I knew I had something — and no one accepted me. Not a single college.” Years later, she was accepted into the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University, where she studied acting. The experience solidified a belief that’s coming in handy now as she parents a young adult about to embark on the whole college application process: “You can be whoever you want whenever you damn please.”
So she’s not stressing about her son’s next chapter. While Devi had a Princeton-or-bust mindset, Jagannathan and her husband are encouraging Anav to take a gap year and volunteer or work in a different country. “I think we live in such a goal-oriented society that to be free of that even for some time is going to have an impact on what he grows up to be,” she says.
In the meantime, she’s cherishing the experience of touring colleges with her son — something the family has been trying to do as much as possible this summer “to narrow down the choices a bit” before the crush of school and work. “I love being on college tours with him. I love it,” she says. “Because you walk into a space and just get a feeling of, what you're seeing is their instinct in action.”
They’ve been looking at schools in the U.K., for example, and she’s noticed “an excitement there” for her son because it’s so far away. It’s what she and her husband, Azad, did, too, so it makes sense. “That crazy journey of being alone and finding your community and finding yourself is an exciting one that we want him to have,” she adds.
More than anything else, Jagannathan simply wants Anav to find a college that fits him and to learn what he chooses.
“I think my own journey with acting and just being passionate about something that I didn't know anything about has always made me, not skeptical of the college journey, but just always reminding him that it's not the end all and be all,” she says. “It goes back to finding a place that you can call home and having a sense of belonging in the world. I really want him to take that year off and just take this time to figure things out. Take as much time as you need; there's no end goal in sight. And we'll all get there.”
If you think Jagannathan is feeling a bit weepy at the idea of her only child heading across the pond, think again. “Oh my God, I can't wait,” she says with a laugh. “Sometimes I stare at his closet and just visualize all my clothes in it.”
She’s not kidding about the closet, but she’s also not quite as
nonchalant as that comment implies; Jagannathan is both excited and potentially devastated. But wherever Anav goes, his parents will visit. A lot. Anav is looking at colleges in Scotland, so she’s scoping out housing in London. “We're a very, very close family and he's an only child,” she explains, “so it's just always been part of our conversation that wherever he ends up, we'll visit very often.”
Jagannathan has already rehearsed this scene, of course, in the last episode of NHIE where she says goodbye to Devi and helps pack her suitcase. In real life, “It hasn't happened yet and I cannot quite fathom what it looks like, even though I think the show was a good dress rehearsal and it was a really intensely sad scene,” she says. “I think it's a very personal journey, so full of hope and optimism. I can't wait for him to discover who he is. I can't wait for the world to see what he does. But we'll be right [there] — a little too close. That's my secret plan.”
Before then, Jagannathan will be stepping into the powerful world of gangsters and crime. She heads to Chicago in the fall to start shooting Deli Boys, and to prepare she’s been watching a lot of gangster documentaries. “There's just an unpredictability with both these characters,” she says of her latest roles.
Then again, there’s a familiar thread, too. Villains never see themselves as the villain, they’re misunderstood good guys. In Deli Boys, Jagannathan can surely relate to her character’s motivation, if not her methods, because as she explains, Lucky's maternal instinct kicks in and she does what she has to do to keep these boys safe. “That's where she comes from.”
Editor’s Note: This interview took place before the SAG-AFTRA strike began.
Credits
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Photographer: Jessica Chou
Assistant: Serena Chen
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Makeup: Daria Matiunina
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VP, Video: Reshma Gopaldas
Video Editors: Jacqueline Soller, Allie O'Connell
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"I can't wait for him to discover who he is. I can't wait for the world to see what he does. But we'll be right [there] — a little too close. That's my secret plan.”
Poorna Jagannathan
Letting go of the old to make room for the new isn’t just the culmination of Dr. Nalini Vishwakumar’s character arc; it’s a storyline that's applicable to the 50-year-old Jagannathan’s own life right now. Never Have I Ever, the show that cemented her status as a TV star after two decades of steadily working in the business, has ended its award-winning run after four seasons. And not unlike her character reconciling the fact that her daughter is going to Princeton at the show’s end, Jagannathan is preparing for her own empty-nest phase as her 17-year-old son Anav enters his senior year of high school this fall.
Jagannathan is holding close the whole NHIE experience — what it has meant to her personally and professionally — but she’s ready for what’s next. Relaxing in the quiet of her Los Angeles home while talking to SheKnows over Zoom, she references a line her character says toward the end of the season: “I know, it’s scary — our lives are changing. But change is good. Change is necessary.”
She’s not kidding about the closet, but she’s also not quite as nonchalant as that comment implies; Jagannathan is both excited and potentially devastated. But wherever Anav goes, his parents will visit. A lot. Anav is looking at colleges in Scotland, so she’s scoping out housing in London. “We're a very, very close family and he's an only child,” she explains, “so it's just always been part of our conversation that wherever he ends up, we'll visit very often.”
Jagannathan has already rehearsed this scene, of course, in the last episode of NHIE where she says goodbye to Devi and helps pack her suitcase. In real life, “It hasn't happened yet and I cannot quite fathom what it looks like, even though I think the show was a good dress rehearsal and it was a really intensely sad scene,” she says. “I think it's a very personal journey, so full of hope and optimism. I can't wait for him to discover who he is. I can't wait for the world to see what he does. But we'll be right [there] — a little too close. That's my secret plan.”
Before then, Jagannathan will be stepping into the powerful world of gangsters and crime. She heads to Chicago in the fall to start shooting Deli Boys, and to prepare she’s been watching a lot of gangster documentaries. “There's just an unpredictability with both these characters,” she says of her latest roles.
Then again, there’s a familiar thread, too. Villains never see themselves as the villain, they’re misunderstood good guys. In Deli Boys, Jagannathan can surely relate to her character’s motivation, if not her methods, because as she explains, Lucky is simply a mom doing her best to keep her sons safe. “That's where she comes from.”
Outfit: House of Masaba | Shoes: JLo by Jennifer Lopez | Necklaces: Maalicious & Bebek Jewels | Rings: Maison Miru | Earrings & bracelet: Dior
Editor’s Note: This interview took place before the SAG-AFTRA strike began.
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