Known for his Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay for the 2017 comedy film The Big Slick and for his role as Dinesh in the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley, Kumail Nanjiani will be taking on a more serious task. As serious as murder. The 44-year-old will play Somen “Steve” Banerjee, an Indian immigrant who founded a male-stripping empire in Hulu’s Welcome to Chippendales. In an interview published on Thursday, Nanjiani told Vanity Fair:
Writer for the show, Robert Siegel, also spoke to Vanity Fair:
“This is by far the most challenging job I’ve ever done, in terms of the length of the shoot, the content of the scenes, and emotional difficulty of those scenes. It’s one of those things where I just jumped in, and trusted that it’d reveal itself as it goes — and it did."
Here’s a first look at Kumail Nanjiani and his castmates below:
“This was a chance to say a lot of things about the American dream, about capitalism, about assimilation, and what it means to be an American."
Steve Banerjee’s Grand American Dream Turn into a Tragic Nightmare
Somen “Steve” Banerjee was an ambitious immigrant who saved enough money from his day job at a gas station to open a nightclub. From there, he tried out various gimmicks, including female mud-wrestling, to stand out. It would be a sexy male striptease routine, exclusively performed for women, that would be the lucrative niche in which he sought success. At one point, Banerjee partnered with Paul Snider (played by Dan Stevens), who would go on to kill his Playboy Playmate wife, Dorothy Stratten (Nicola Peltz Beckham), and himself. However, Banerjee would soon develop a more theatrical show with Emmy award-winning producer and choreographer Nick De Noia.
Unfortunately, the more Banerjee got, the more he wanted and often clashed with everyone around him. He was charged with enlisting the aid of Ray Colon, a former Palm Springs police officer and lounge room entertainer, in a 1987 plot against De Noia. And in 1990 and 1991, a plot to kill Michael Fullington, a former Chippendales dancer and choreographer, and two other ex-Chippendales dancers, who Banerjee felt was competition to the Chippendales franchise. Steve Banerjee pleaded guilty to attempted arson, racketeering, and murder for hire and entered into a plea agreement that would have led to 26 years in prison, and loss of his share of Chippendales. He died by suicide in his prison cell in 1994.
Writer Robert Siegel had this to add in his interview with Vanity Fair about Welcome to Chippendales:
Welcome to Chippendales premieres later this year on Hulu.
“It hit a lot of my pleasure buttons. It felt like Scarface or Goodfellas or Boogie Nights. It’s bad people doing bad things. But what differentiates it from another wannabe Martin Scorsese movie is that you take out Tony Montana and put in this nerdy, socially awkward Indian immigrant.”
