Roshan Sethi, The Simp

Brett sits down with writer/director and oncologist (you read that right!) Roshan Sethi to discuss his debut novel, The Simp. He unpacks his rise from medicine to the arts, and his drive behind all of it. Diversity, race, sexuality, 'The White Lotus', 'A Nice Indian Boy,' and Hollywood assistants. Is it satire or real life?

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Transcript

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Brett Benner 0:00

Hey everybody, it's Brett Benner, and welcome back to another episode of Behind the Stack, where today I am sitting down with author Roshan Sethi for his debut book, The Simp. This was such an interesting conversation for me to have because Roshan works in the television and film industry, so we had a lot to discuss about the current state of affairs in television and film, which relates directly to everything that's going on in this book. But a little bit about Roshan. He's a writer, director, and practicing oncologist. He is the co-creator of The Resident, which ran for six seasons on Fox. His directorial debut, Seven Days, won the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature. He subsequently directed World's Best for Disney+, and co-wrote the abortion drama Call Jane, which premiered at Sundance in 2022. His third film as a director, A Nice Indian Boy, premiered at South by Southwest to rave reviews. His next film, The Surgeon, starring Michelle Yeoh and Martin Freeman, is forthcoming. The Simp is his debut novel. He lives in Los Angeles. So I hope you enjoy this episode of Behind the Stack Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode where today I'm really thrilled to be sitting down with Roshan Sethi for his debut novel, The Simp, which is so fantastic. And for anybody who works in and around Hollywood, hits just a little bit too close to home. So thank you for being here. It's wonderful to meet you.

Roshan Sethi 1:35

Thank you for having me.

Brett Benner 1:37

So you're originally from Calgary, yes? Yes.

Roshan Sethi 1:39

Yeah, from Calgary, Alberta.

Brett Benner 1:41

Which is amazing 'cause you have a, a wonderful parachute should you need it.

Roshan Sethi 1:45

Yeah. I'm a dual citizen still, so yeah, I have every option

Brett Benner 1:51

Yeah, you're the envy of, of multitudes of people currently. So we started a talk before we were recording that you went to Harvard Medical School and you're a practicing oncologist. I mean, clearly the first thing I need to say to you is, like, you're really slacking because you're a filmmaker, you're now a novelist, you're an oncologist. It's kind of insane. I don't know when you sleep, frankly.

Roshan Sethi 2:14

Yeah, I sleep quite a bit actually, but it's mainly just because I was, closeted for so long, so I had this intense hunger for achievement that, is starting to fade, and so is my ability to maintain all of these balls that I have up in the air that I'm constantly juggling. But yeah, it kind of has a... It always-- It feels impressive on the outside, but it actually has a kind of sad origin- which I mention only to make it more relatable. But if I had been straight, I think I would be a radiologist at Kaiser and we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Brett Benner 2:41

I'm interested in this because I was gonna say, do you think that your drive is influenced by your family, or it's your queerness, or it's a combination of the both?

Roshan Sethi 2:48

I think it's just, yeah, it's the queerness. It's this, this hunger to feel a, a greater sense of self-worth with every new career that I take on, which is something I still struggle with, crazily enough, uh, because it never feels like e- enough achievement is enough, weirdly. But I'm very, very oriented and focused on accomplishment. S- I have been since a young age to a degree that is just really too much.

Brett Benner 3:10

Were you always interested in writing?

Roshan Sethi 3:11

Always, yeah. I was a big reader growing up. I didn't watch hardly anything, but I read a lot. And in the beginning, I mainly read epic fantasy and until about the age of, I'd say, like 17. Then I suddenly took a hard turn towards literary fiction, 'cause I went to Yale and I suddenly felt like I needed to be, like, pretentious and literary, or that my previous tastes were kind of embarrassing or, like, a little squalid. So I left epic fantasy behind. I did let myself finish the Game of Thrones series, which at the time was not the phenomenon it is now in the media world. It was a publishing phenomenon though much before that 'cause the first book was published in 1996. But I finished the Game of Thrones book, Feast for Crows, and then I just never looked back and I just started reading hardcore literary fiction and tried to model myself as like a literary writer to varying degrees of success, mostly no success. And then I ended up going into screenwriting, which I found was much more open to me, oddly. Or maybe my abilities were more suited to it. I couldn't quite tell. And I left literary fiction behind, and now this is my first return to writing prose.

Brett Benner 4:10

Did you have formal education for screenwriting?

Roshan Sethi 4:12

No, I took one seminar at Yale, that was not very useful, and then I mainly taught myself. And screenwriting, I think- It's interesting, people never really ask that about the novel. They ask that constantly about screenwriting because something is made to appear technical about screenwriting. And in some ways it is. It's a much more disciplined form of writing than, fiction, because there's a structure that almost everything i- uh, hews to, whether you want it to or not, and because it's so much more oriented around story, honestly, than fiction is. But it was not frankly rocket science, and I figured out whatever I needed to, and then became a better writer the more that I watched things, which I really hadn't done much of. I watched Godfather for the first time when I was, like, 27. It... I was really- kind of uneducated as far as movies were concerned. But for this entire time, I've still read more than I've watched, and I still worship fiction and,, am less worshipful of film and TV, which now I think is mostly bad anyways, so there's less to worship. But, fiction is, has always been the goal. Weird.

Brett Benner 5:08

And now that you've done it, now that you've written your first... Or I should say now that you've published your first book, what medium for you do you enjoy more?

Roshan Sethi 5:18

I enjoy fiction more. I think it's, it's just a special form of art to embody someone else's consciousness and to share it with a complete stranger. It's just, it's unlike anything else. The things I admire about screenwriting is, is, like I said already, I think it is much more rigorous and disciplined about writing in a way that I think literary fiction could benefit from. There's a little bit too much indulgence and wandering, especially in high art and in very sophisticated literary fiction. There's an almost absence of story because I find literary fiction writers are a little bit embarrassed by story. That I think they could take more from screenwriting, but the, the style of the form is, is really still very exceptional and will survive forever, I think.

Brett Benner 5:57

I love the story of how you kind of ended up in Hollywood, which is you started to send out queries for shows looking for medical consultants, which I think is amazing. Yeah. How many did you send out before one bit?

Roshan Sethi 6:08

Well, I probably sent 60, and I guessed their email addresses as first name.last name@gmail, first letter of first name last name @gmail, and I would put them in BCC and just see what mailer demoned back to me. And I was able to guess most people's email addresses that way. Surprisingly, you'd think it won't work, but it did. But the one person who replied actually was, a Facebook message. At the time, you could just Facebook message a stranger without it being sorted into a different folder. And Amy Holden Jones replied and eventually hired me as a consultant. But I was lying in the beginning because I was telling everybody that I was a full-fledged doctor when in fact I was a few weeks into medical school. But they were obviously not likely to hire me as a medical consultant if I didn't have any medical knowledge, which was 100% the case and the truth. But, I also understood, unconsciously even back then, another truth, which is that the industry is just totally closed off, and the people who make it in make it in often randomly, not by dint of their talent or ability. So I was prepared to connive my way in, which I did, successfully. And I don't think I would've gotten a foot in the door as a random Indian in Boston if I hadn't been a doctor, interestingly. So the two careers- Hmm while they seem completely unrelated, one depended entirely on the other. But I had that immediate credibility. I was a doctor at Harvard, and I was asking to write on or consult on these medical shows, which I eventually worked my way up to creating my own, and then eventually left behind writing about medicine more or less, even though I've sort of made a late return to it.

Brett Benner 7:22

Yeah. And it's also an interesting thing too because, writing for television is such a different beast than, say, writing a screenplay just because of- Yeah the urgency of it. And I'm always so amazed, especially on network television, although it's changed so dramatically, where it used to be 22 episodes, sometimes 24 episodes a season, and having to break those stories, those A, B, and C beats and all those things. Yeah.

Roshan Sethi 7:44

Yeah, and that quality of writing has really declined dramatically. But when you look back at the heyday of network television, House, Desperate Housewives, Lost, those are just insanely expertly plotted shows that were not less sophisticated for having a cliffhanger every 15 minutes or for being on ABC or NBC. They were broad and, and sophisticated at the exact same time, which is now something we struggle with. What, what is interesting is that the quality of TV writing has deteriorated so much because there are no longer any limits to the form. We're not writing to cliffhangers or act breaks anymore, and there are no limitations on what you can show or do in most networks, other than still on broadcast network, which is more monitored than any other networks. So as a result, strangely, because there's no rules anymore, and because it's turned from rhyming poetry to free verse, it's just gotten worse. It's more vibey and random. So now most shows are just so insanely undisciplined in their style of writing. But the kind of writing that I came up in, and I'm not saying that I'm any more capable of it than anyone writing right now, was those shows that I already mentioned, House and Desperate Housewives, just expertly, expertly plotted shows. The Good Wife., That... A, a very, very hard thing to pull off. Way harder than writing Margo's Got Money Troubles, honestly.

Brett Benner 8:58

Well, I also think of because of the medical stuff, all, all of that. To me, it- Yeah it's almost, it's the same as the procedurals and the, the Law Orders and all of those kind of things where I'm like, "How many ripped from the headlines can you stay on top of?"

Roshan Sethi 9:13

Yeah.

Brett Benner 9:13

To finish your season out. I mean, it's really insane. So then when did you start directing?

Roshan Sethi 9:17

I started directing when I, turned 33 in 2020, and I, had finished residency, so I suddenly had more time. I'm a part-time attending. I work 10 weeks of the year doing on-call at ra- radiation oncology at Brigham and Dana Farber. So I had 42 weeks to do anything else, where I truly had no medical obligations. So I set about with Karan, my partner, Karan Soni, to make a small film set in mostly one room called Seven Days, which the Duplass brothers financed and produced. And it ended up winning a Spirit Award and then getting me essentially the rest of my directing career. But it was made out of nothing. It was made out of dust, and it is literally just two people talking to each other, Karan and Gerald Dean was one of them. But, uh, was a true labor of love. And Karan is a huge improviser. We wrote the script together, but you know, fully 30% to 50% of the dialogue was just invented on the spot, reinvented on the spot by him. That's a kind of his secret power, is he's a writer and an actor, and he's doing both at the same time. He's writing and acting in the moment, which is the sort of miracle of improv, but often produces things that are much funnier than anything that's scripted, because it's coming out of the reality of the moment and a person rather than something on the page. So that's how we made that movie, and then we've, we've stayed kind of creative partners and real life partners since.

Brett Benner 10:29

Yeah. He does have that... It's the golden ticket of that knack of actors who are capable of improvising and thinking on their feet. And for, I know for comedy writers, especially in the worlds that I'm in, that's kind of the, the chalice they're looking for- Yeah is somebody who's gonna be able to do that to help flesh stuff out, and he's so, he's so incredibly capable.

Roshan Sethi 10:49

Yeah. He truly is.

Brett Benner 10:51

And so that's when you guys did, and this is the first time I actually discovered you, was through, the, the movie that you guys did together with Jonathan Groff.

Roshan Sethi 10:59

Yeah.

Brett Benner 11:00

Which was so, so... Just, it's so wonderful, and I, I saw you speaking about it, and you said, you know, you felt that it was really either hitting at the right time or it's, it was a movie that really was touching so many people because people were really looking for something that was positive and, and, and sweet and something that, just spoke about love and connection, and it, and it really did. I- my husband and I were driving up the coast from Los Angeles 'cause we were moving from Los Angeles, and we stopped in this hotel, this rundown hotel one night with our dogs, and I was like, "We have to watch this movie." I said, "I'm so interested in this, and this guy who's directing it," I said, "he's coming out with a book that I'm really interested in." And my God, we loved it so, so much. It's, it's just, it's wonderful.

Roshan Sethi 11:41

Thank you. Well, I really appreciate that. That movie was also a very difficult path, and we worried it would reach nobody 'cause we had such a hard time getting distribution for it. So it's a relief to hear that it touched you guys in that rundown hotel. But I do think people are looking for... to feel something. They're just really desperate to feel something because we're all a little lo- numbed and anesthetized by- Yeah a variety of things. One, just the overwhelming amount of bad news, and then b- that seems to be occurring in the world, b, the existential fear of so many things we can't control, and then c, just our phones, and the endlessness of the scroll is the restlessness of not feeling. You're just, you're constantly moving from one thing to another, and as a result, feeling nothing. Yeah. We're all looking for a, for an actual feeling.

Brett Benner 12:22

100%. I should... I didn't even say the title of the movie when I started this, which was nice. So yes, I, I was, like, talking like everybody knows it, but for our, for our listeners and for our viewers- No,

Roshan Sethi 12:32

no, no.

Brett Benner 12:32

So all right. Onto the book, and it's interesting hearing you talk a little bit earlier about how you kind of worked your way into the business, and I thought you were already laying the seeds for the story you were eventually gonna tell. But- Yeah do you have an elevator pitch for The Simp?

Roshan Sethi 12:48

It... Well, it's a, it's about a really- crazy Hollywood couple who are very rich and very powerful and hire an assistant who's not quite what he seems, and he worms his way into their lives, and it's a little bit like Parasite. It was based on a very viral advertisement, for a job that a sort of rich, artsy couple was advertising. And, I reimagined it, knowing nothing about the actual people who wrote the ad, into this book. And then I merged it a little bit with Karan, my romantic partner, Karan Soni, his life. So he is nothing like the character in the book, but the character's antecedents in India, and his early days in the acting community in Hollywood are very much drawn from Karan's life. Little things that he had experienced, at the very beginning of his career when he first started out.

Brett Benner 13:34

Set the book kind of, uh, a- as you write it in the book, the halcyon days of post, BLM, in 2021. And I have to say, as someone who who has worked in the industry for too long and, and, and gone through this whole, kind of changes in the industry, you have nailed so much of it, as it continues to, I don't know if evolve is the right word, but as we continue to kind of trudge on through all this. But... And it's funny 'cause, you know, the book is being k- called a satire and, and at the same times I'm like, is it satire if it's really so close to life? I don't really know if I'd call it satire.

Roshan Sethi 14:10

Yeah,

Brett Benner 14:12

it's a g- I mean, where's the line? I think for people who are outside of it and are, you know, the person who's reading it in, in Boulder, Colorado, they'd be like, "Oh my God, this is so funny." But to be in it, I'm like, dear God, he is, like, so on it. So on it. Yeah. It's really funny. I wanted to read this passage from the book that I loved so much, and, and then I have a question for you afterwards. This is taking place at a diversity panel and, you know, for anybody outside of the business, this kind of thing happened all the time and continues to happen. Mm-hmm and I know, you know, as someone who works in casting, we would get all the time, you know, the push for diversity from our network executives and the studio executives who are over us, and I remember one saying, "You know, we, we have these groups that come in and they yell at us if we're not being diverse enough, so you have to think about it." And- Yeah that always has stuck with me. This is on a diversity panel, and people are really trying to say, like, you know, "Your voices are important, and we really want you to speak out." And then one particular man speaks out who,, is South Asian, and he says All this change is a false promise. They've given us crumbs, and we shouldn't care about representation. We should care about equality. White people have always held onto their power in the arts with clenched fists. This is not so much the case in medicine or tech or finance, where whites have succumbed or are in the process of succumbing to hordes of ambitious Indians and Americans or Asians. When I say the arts, I'm talking about publishing, ballet, theater, movies, chapbooks, poetry, he said. They're all run by white people who will let go of financial power, but not cultural power. The white people of medicine were forced to let their guard down due to extremely high and undeniable MCAT scores, while the white people of the arts were more vigilant and successful due to the widespread bullshit of these fields at resisting the advance of the diverse army. The resistance is unconscious. They undermine the potential richness of the arts in their effort to protect it. If you want to participate in the arts, you have to play by the rules. You have to perform your ethnicity as if it's a part in a play. It's what we're doing right now. So I read this and I reread this last night, and you are very outspoken, especially on, you know, watching you on Instagram. And so I kept thinking, is this, or this particular thing seemed one of the most vocal parts of the book to me in terms of an essence of things. And- Mm-hmm this is very much you speaking through this character, I think. Yes?

Roshan Sethi 16:35

Yeah. I describe him like me physically, and then he's named Devon Prekash, which is the name of the lead of The Resident, the show that I created. So yes, he's just me. And I describe him as- unpleasant dark energy who has no solutions, which I also think is me. And so yeah. I legitimately believe, I felt like I had to appear once in the book to say my dark thoughts and then disappear. But, the rest, I hope the story would communicate, because people don't really listen or pay attention to dialogue. They're alive to story, but not so much dialogue. That's probably less true of a book than it is of a movie or a show. But yeah, that was the one time I allowed to myself to declare myself. But I love the way you read it. I wish you would just do my readings. I, uh, hate reading out loud while people are watching me. But, yeah, should just have recorded that.

Brett Benner 17:17

So, okay, so Raj is our protagonist, our hero, not hero, of the novel, as it were. Like we, you said, he goes to work for this Jim and Anna H., who I always kind of pictured him as kind of Guy Ritchie, Yeah and, a- a- and some version of, like, Lauren

Roshan Sethi 17:32

Feeling accurate. Yeah.

Brett Benner 17:34

Raj assumes this role for them of effectively somebody who could be a nobody,, who learns how to make himself invisible for them. And you start the book with the actual, laundry list of things, the, the, the ad or what they need These people who are, again, so accurate, are they kind of amalgam for you of a lot of different people or were you very specific in your mind- Yeah about who they were?

Roshan Sethi 17:56

Yeah, they're really based on nobody because I don't know anybody quite like them and yet I know so many people like them. But they, but yeah, they're... I don't know Guy Ritchie for example, though I could fully see him acting that way, with no prior knowledge of, again, having ever met him. But, uh, yeah, it wasn't based on Guy Ritchie and, uh, it wasn't based on anyone else. See, some of them are just little stories I've heard along the way. I heard, for example, of a director who said, "Let's fuck," instead of action, and I thought, "Wow, that's pretty crazy." I put that in the book. But, yeah, I don't know this person in any way and I don't know his wife either, and yet they came to me sort of unbidden from the various little fragments I've accumulated over years in this industry.

Brett Benner 18:33

I'm so curious because y- just talking about representation Do you think that looking at all the-- I'm talking specifically film or television. Books is a whole other world we can start- Yeah to get into in terms of representation. But do you think it's-- Do you think television does a better job of representation than film does, or do you think it's all still pretty miserable?

Roshan Sethi 18:56

I think it's all still pretty miserable. I mean, I look at Apple TV, for example, which just has one white bourgeois show after another. It doesn't feel to me like there's any movement to expand its extremely narrow audience. They have fewer people watching Apple TV than Hallmark right now, and they nevertheless have these huge budgets which they use to pay, like Cameron Diaz, twenty million dollars. But they're not really in any way interested in broadening their audience by making shows that would relate to more than just a very specific band of upper class white people in New York and LA. So yeah, there's things like that which just fill me with anger because I find them so oblivious to the way the world actually is. That obliviousness really bothers me because the people who are consuming media right now by and large are minorities, and yet the people who are making it are interested in a very subset of the population and appealing to them, which shows that are not of the highest quality. In movies, I feel the same sort of issue. I don't feel it w- in one more than the other. And I think that representation is the whole issue, like I say in the book and like I've, said elsewhere as well, because the idea has become that, minorities should be in movies simply because they should be in movies. Like we should be making an attempt to showcase their existence. And instead, the problem all along to me has been that there isn't access for your talent if you're not white. There's not the same access. If Timothée Chalamet was Indian, he would not have the life that he currently has, and you can say that for almost every other actor of his general age range. I'm picking a young actor because you'd think they would have more access, and yet I don't think they do. I don't think Tom Hyland- Holland would be Spider-Man if he was Indian with the exact same level of talent. I'm pretty sure Marvel would not have cast him as Spider-Man. I think the same is true of Josh O'Connor or Mike Faist or any of the sort of wispy young white guys whose careers have undergone these dramatic escalations because they're all talented. They all have actual ability. But would that talent have been realized if they were a different race? We all know intuitively, if we're in the industry, that it wouldn't have. And that's something that we simply accept or are asked to accept. That is the problem. The, the inability for real talent to be realized is the issue. Karan has had a very different career than Michael Sarah.

Brett Benner 21:06

Yeah, a hundred percent. Raj has a relationship that develops that's- really sweet- Yeah with this older man in acting class named Anthony, who, who truly believes that Raj is incredibly talented, and it's just a matter of time. I'm so curious, in your mind, is Raj that person? Because it seems like Raj, in terms of how he feels about himself, there is a belief system that, yes, he has to believe, right? You have to believe that you are. Sure. But is it folly or is it, or is it truth?

Roshan Sethi 21:39

I think he is actually extremely talented. The problem is that you're not always in command of your ability, and your ability to access your ability is based on how much people believe in you, even though we all wish it wasn't. I have written some exceptional things, and I've written some really bad things, and a lot of it has to do with what's around me and what I believe about myself and what I believe I'm capable of. I think the same is true for acting, though I can't say for sure because I'm not an actor. But I'm sure you, as a casting director, have seen actors who are exceptional and yet whiff an audition, and vice versa. People who are generally not that talented who some- somehow pull something out of somewhere that you didn't expect. All of that shows, I think, that ability is not black and white. It's not a fixed quantity. It's something that depends very much on the system around it. And if you're in a system that is saying to you from the beginning that, uh, you'll never be Timothée Chalamet if you're Indian, then what of yourself can you access? Who can you fully be? I think that's something that people experience all the time. And the blank indifference of the industry and the vast success of whiteness is, is a very, uh, defeating thing. But I think deep down, in terms of the heights to which he can go, Raj is really talented. I don't know if that matters in terms of his accesses.

Brett Benner 22:50

But he's very smart, too. Mm-hmm. And that's the thing. And you're rooting for him because he does find these avenues. He does figure out even the way he gets hired because he's so routinely rejected by this heinous assistant at first and then learns how to kind of maneuver his way through this. But it's a- what, the thing that you do so much with this, and once he figures out a way to maneuver through this system to get into where he needs to get, but you also bring up so much about just this relationship between employer and employee and that kind of situation. I mean, this is everywhere, but it's, it's so prevalent to me in Los Angeles and, and I was part of that. I had two children. Yeah. I had a nanny that was coming in every day because of work. But the relationship that gets established between these people, these kind of well-off white people effectively, having these people work for them and how they treat them. And even if these people think that they're treating them correctly, I, I... but I think it's even referenced at one point, it's almost like Raj is effectively a, a, a, a very well-behaved dog who is- Mm-hmm doing what he needs to do and behaving appropriately and finding the way to ingratiate himself so that he's indispensable. And-

Roshan Sethi 24:03

Yeah

Brett Benner 24:05

it's really fascinating. And- Resonated. I don't know. Resonated a lot.

Roshan Sethi 24:11

Yeah, it's interesting because there's so many different ways of reacting to and navigating this industry. Curran, for example, would never do any of the things described in the book. He doesn't share actually most of my anger or outrage, which is often on his behalf. He's just not built that way. He's a very calm, even-keeled, understanding, empathetic, kind person, and he doesn't go to the extremes of emotion that I go to. 'Cause now I'm so blended by the industry that when I look at it, I just feel like a vibrating anger. He's not like that at all. So he would never do any of those. And most of what I've described in the book is things that I would do, honestly. And I describe leaks because I think in some ways we vacillate, all of us who are navigating different obstacles in the industry, whether they're gender or sexuality or race. We vacillate between being the simp, being more accepting and, uh, maneuvering as one needs to maneuver, and my sort of outright sometimes outrageous anger. And you can't always be one or the other. The other thing I was very conscious of is I didn't want it to be a tender, cautious minority who has done nothing wrong and who is victimized by everyone around him, because that is immediately hard to believe because none of us lead lives like that. And, uh, in a weird way it deprives them, minorities, of interiority and humanity when they are acting in such a blameless way. And the point is not that minorities are better people than white people. That's silly and nobody believes that, I think, deep down. The point is that they have less access and less equity, no matter whether they're good or bad, and that is, uh, on the face of it, wrong. I mentioned in the book, or maybe it got taken out, I can't remember, but the White Lotus, for example, Mike White, nobody understands people more than Mike White. He's such a discerning mind for people's idiosyncrasies and their quirks. He's so perceptive and he's so insightful, and nobody really writes like him. And yet at the same time, he has the same very familiar blind spot, which is that he doesn't quite know what to do with minority characters. In the first season he has, for example, a young Black woman who's living in the house with Connie Britton, surrounded by these people who are going on and on about race. She has to passively endure the things that they say. And she never acts in a way that is truly blameworthy because he doesn't quite know how much humanity to invest her with. Because to say that she is wrong or bad, even though everybody in that show is so compromised in so many ways, she ends up being the least compromised, interestingly, because she is the object and not the subject, which is the way that we're naturally inclined to write minorities. So it's, it's like a recurring thing that even the greatest talents like Mike White, who I think is one of the best writers working, is vulnerable to.

Brett Benner 26:40

I also wonder too if a part of that is as someone who's white being overly conscious of doing something that might be perceived offensive

Roshan Sethi 26:48

That's totally what, that's totally what it comes out of. If, when you answer them, "So what's the solution to that? Should he not write minorities in because he's, doesn't wanna do the wrong thing?" And I, I think, I don't know about a show like The White Lotus, which in its first season wanted to take on race, being written and directed entirely by one white guy. I think there was probably room for collaboration of some kind. I understand that he has a very distinctive style of writing, directing, and editing. Um, and I myself sometimes have trouble collaborating. So I get it. But, but yeah, it gets tricky. It's not so much to me that Mike White needs to write better minority characters as, I need more opportunities to put my writing on screen, and other people with similar levels of ability. But, you know, that I think it's much easier for him to get a show made than it is for me.

Brett Benner 27:31

Yeah. Yeah.

Roshan Sethi 27:33

If I write about

Brett Benner 27:33

India. One, one of the things that you did that's so interesting because this character is queer as well, and yet it's not a prevalent part of the whole dialogue of the book. It's just a part of who he is, which I found really interesting because it would've been easy to... But, but it's also at the same time as a character and as a person, and as someone who is, say, this person in particular who wants to be an actor, it's a double whammy, right? Because not only he's dealing with race, but he's also dealing with queerness Which has presented itself so differently. And I remember it 'cause I was an actor back in the day. Yeah. That was the thing that terrified me at the time because coming out meant it was over for you. There was, there was no Jonathan Baileys of the world. That didn't happen. Yeah. There was no Matt Bomers. You know, and even I think someone like Matt Bomer hasn't been completely exempt in the queerness thing from- Yeah okay, this is what you play. It's very hard to go back. Bailey has- Yeah strangely been able to, not strangely, I guess I should say it's great.

Roshan Sethi 28:29

Yeah.

Brett Benner 28:30

With this character you've created, I just thought it was interesting that his queerness was something, but it wasn't the driving force. It really, which I appreciated. It was more of the, the race aspect of it, which I think becomes prevalent. And I don't know if that's because you could see race immediately, right? You don't necessarily see sexuality- Yeah immediately in someone. I don't know.

Roshan Sethi 28:49

Well, I think that it all, I think, yeah, the, I think there's a certain generation of queer actors who never got their due because of exactly what you're pointing to, and it all is part of the equation. The things that have to be undeniably said about both Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer is they're capable of being straight acting, which is very much part of the equation, whether anyone wants to talk about it or not.

Brett Benner 29:09

Right.

Roshan Sethi 29:09

And if you are John Early, you have a different career because there's an undeniably gay aspect to you that only fits in- Right certain roles, people say. So the queerness thing is actually all an exercise in how much of yourself and your gayness, which are two very related things, you show on any, in any given moment. And I'm sure you are as accustomed as I am to how gay you are in any moment with the people you're talking to. Sure. It's a thing- Sure that you can titrate to some extent, not fully. And that constant act of dissimulation is, is, something that I don't think straight people are very familiar with. I think women are, but I don't know that straight men are because they require so much, society life requires so much less dissimulation for a straight man than it does for a woman or for a gay man or for a gay woman for sure. So I think all of that is, it's, it's in there for sure. And, um- It's also interesting how many actors in our industry succeed in originally gay roles. Nicholas Galitzine and Josh O'Connor are being really good examples of actors who s- honestly play queer so often that I did literally think they were gay, and I was shocked-

Brett Benner 30:14

Of course, of course. Yeah that they weren't. Yeah.

Roshan Sethi 30:14

But they ca- they came out as straight at exactly the right time. They... And I'm not saying that this was deliberate or manipulative, but it somehow did work out that they were possibly queer until they were possibly and definitely not queer, and that transition happened at right the, at exactly the right moment somehow, something that they clarified when the time was right. And I do think that's, like, another huge issue in the industry. A- and I know everyone is go- goes back and forth about should gay actors play gay roles and all that, and I am just vehemently on the side of gay roles should go to gay actors. Because- Yeah if you are an straight up gay man whose sexuality is not something you can obscure, then you don't have access to the same number of roles as someone who's not, and so those roles should go to you. And you definitely should not profit in your career from doing sort of beloved artsy gay movies in the early parts of your career, and then transitioning immediately to very straight roles, which I think is a phase. So those forms of injustice exist, not just for race, but for sexuality and for gender. They're everywhere. It's a deeply unfair industry. Probably nobody knows that better than you 'cause you're a casting director. You're right at the nexus of this thing that we're talking about much more than I am, honestly, 'cause you're hearing, I'm sure, and have heard all kinds of things over the years. But, uh, it, it's, it's an injustice. Those injustices I find hard to accept 'cause they're just not present in medicine in the same way.

Brett Benner 31:36

No, no, no, I don't think any of it is, and it's all about perception. Yeah. And I, and I, and I'm in this right now. Like, we, we were speaking earlier with what I'm working on currently, and I... We've had this moment with this particular role we're casting where my, my partner and I were talking, she and I were talking about, okay, there's something about this role that could, could read gay, could be this guy could be this. Yeah. And we had to ask last week our producers, 'cause we were sending over choices of guys who-

Roshan Sethi 32:01

Yeah

Brett Benner 32:01

uh, were on variations on a spectrum. Yeah. And we said, "Is this something that you're okay with, or do you not want this?" Because- Hmm we just have to know if we're steering away from that, or we can lean- Yeah into it, and how much we can lean into something.

Roshan Sethi 32:14

And what did they say?

Brett Benner 32:16

They were like, "No, no, no." I didn't really expect anybody to say, "No." Yeah, no. You know what I mean? I didn't expect that. But, um, they're like, "Can we have this conversation on the phone?" But- I certainly expected... And then we didn't. We, "No, we're fine with that if that's, if that's what it is."

Roshan Sethi 32:34

Yeah.

Brett Benner 32:38

But we did question it in the beginning because a lot of the people that they weren't responding to initially, we knew even if they didn't, that they were queer.

Roshan Sethi 32:44

Yeah.

Brett Benner 32:45

Or somewhere on that spectrum

Roshan Sethi 32:48

Yeah

Brett Benner 32:48

So it's just an interesting thing

Roshan Sethi 32:49

Which, which you can't ask also, as you know. No You can't ask an actor's sexuality. Sometimes it seems obvious, but it's obviously not even a thing you can admit to. So it's such a, it's such a crazy, complex thing.

Brett Benner 33:01

No, and it's become very complex, too, with studios and networks being very concerned about any kind of legality, right? Mm-hmm. So we've had even had to work it-- When we did the role that Michael Urie plays on Shrinking-

Roshan Sethi 33:15

Yeah

Brett Benner 33:15

we, they, they wanted a gay actor. That was a mandate that, that for our producers, we wanted a gay actor.

Roshan Sethi 33:20

Yeah.

Brett Benner 33:20

So I could start with a list, but then we c- couldn't go beyond that. So what we started to have to say to agents are, "We're looking for a gay actor. Obviously, we can't ask your client-" Yeah if they're, if they are and they wanna come in, fantastic. But we're not looking for a straight person who is gonna play gay or someone who had experience in college and now is married." Yeah. Like, we want some... And s- so, and it wor- and it wor- And we had, you know, we had a great kind of cornucopia and selection to choose from of people. That's why I said, like, so much of this book, it, it's not satire to me. It's right on. Yep. It is it.

Roshan Sethi 34:03

Um- It's happening. It's... Well, the- Yes show of your work is so diverse, though. I mean, they, 'cause you think about the original iteration of Grey's Anatomy, how striking that was that, that, that cast wasn't all white back then in terms of his best friend and the nurse. Like, it was, it was a big deal when that show was first on and even the spin-off, too.

Brett Benner 34:21

Yeah, but it's interesting that you say that. But one of the things as I'm sitting here with you today is as we're doing this now, you know, we have this new iteration with these new interns. Yeah. And we kept saying from the beginning, "We need someone South Asian. We have no representation there." Yeah. And we're in a fucking hospital. We're in the

Roshan Sethi 34:38

hospital. Yeah. Like, we're

Brett Benner 34:39

just not-- they're not all gonna be white people. They're just not.

Roshan Sethi 34:41

The white doctor, really, it's kind of a fiction, at least at Harvard or at a good hospital, because the, they can't keep up with the Asians and the Indians and the Nigerians. We're just crazy. Right. And it's not because we have bigger brains, it's because we have so much to prove. And, uh, we're getting higher on the MCAT, and now if you see a white person at Harvard, it's literally like a form of affirmative action 'cause you can't have an entire plat of Indians. You just cannot. It's too crazy. So it-- But yeah, it, it's interesting watching all these very big medical shows like The Pitt, which has, uh, Indians on it, but- Yes but from my count, honestly, not enough. Like, there-- I have not met a Noah Wyle in the hospital. I don't know what that looks like. So, uh, y- you go to the cardiac ICU at Brigham right now, and they're all variations of Dr. Patel. If I try to email a Patel in the hospital on our hospital directory, I could just show you all the names that come up, and that's certainly not gonna happen if you open up the WGA directory. So it's, yeah, it's, it is especially galling with medical shows, um- That we're not there even though we're literally there. I don't even-- Like, I literally tell Indians not to become doctors 'cause it's just too much. We've got too many of them. Go do something else.

Brett Benner 35:47

Right.

Roshan Sethi 35:47

Right.

Brett Benner 35:49

Right. Go be a hairdresser.

Roshan Sethi 35:51

Yeah.

Brett Benner 35:51

Find your joy.

Roshan Sethi 35:53

Or go into Hollywood or, you know.

Brett Benner 35:54

Find your joy. Yeah, and it's even... What's difficult now, and I know you feel this, is this backswing we're having because of this current administration, and we're watching just this kind of whitewashing again, just culturally- Yeah across everything as museums are being dismantled and, um-

Roshan Sethi 36:13

It's just panic I

Brett Benner 36:14

don't know. Yeah.

Roshan Sethi 36:15

It's, it's- It's panic because it, this will eventually be a majority not white country in, uh, 10, 15 years, and everybody knows that deep down. And it's a desire to provide some kind of a bulwark against it. And then it's also just a misconception, I think, among many elites in Hollywood that the audience wants white people, um, because... And I don't know any of the statistics for network television, for example, or for streaming. I'm sure that data exists. It's not published, uh, publicly the way it is for theatrical audiences. But the only people- going to movies now are Black and Latinx.

Brett Benner 36:46

Yeah.

Roshan Sethi 36:47

The white audience has declined dramatically. I suspect that's true also at a place like Netflix. I suspect peak media consumption is highest in minorities just because that seems to be true across the board. Network TV obviously has a very particular demographic, so that might not be the case because of how, the people who watch network TV have aged. So it's, it's all, like, very complicated because the people in charge are making assumptions that were probably true in 1996, but maybe not true now. And there's every business and financial reason to put not white people on TV. And then there's also every creative reason 'cause it's just less boring.

Brett Benner 37:21

Yeah. Well, and it's, and the gatekeepers at the top are all those- People who are in charge white people. They are-

Roshan Sethi 37:26

No.

Brett Benner 37:28

Yes. Frankly, that's what it is. They're making all the decisions, so that's what's kind of so sobering. My last question do you ultimately think this is a positive story for Raj?

Roshan Sethi 37:40

Yeah, I think it is because I feel at the end he's fully realized his ability and he's fully himself, and it doesn't matter in a way because the people in that audience don't matter in the s- the sense of they're not, like, industry movers and shakers. But, yeah, I feel at the end he's fully realized his ability, which I think is all we can do 'cause we can't control the rest, is, just do a good job and display our talent. And I, I feel like I'm constantly chasing my ability. Sometimes I have it and it's exceptional, and sometimes I'm like, "Where did it go?" So whenever I have it in my hands for a brief moment, that's, I think, the real victory because that... the rest is a deeply unjust world that we can't control.

Brett Benner 38:19

Well, the book is great. Everybody, please- Thanks go out and get it. Buy independent if you're capable of buying independent. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. That's really fantastic. No, thank you so much for being here, and I know we got a little off topic, but on topic because it's all kind of related to the book.

Roshan Sethi 38:36

It's all related. And it's a pleasure to meet you. Hopefully our paths will

Brett Benner 38:39

cross. You too. Yeah, I hope so. And if you liked today's episode or other episodes of Behind The Stack, please consider liking and subscribing so that you never miss an episode. Also, what would be really helpful to me is if you can give the show five stars on your podcast platform of choice. All this helps other people discover the show so I can continue bringing you conversations like this one. I'll be back in two weeks with another episode, and until then, you can always find me on Instagram, YouTube, or Substack at Brett's Book Stack. And as always, thanks for listening