Who couldn’t use a happily ever after right now? The one in “A Nice Indian Boy” is filled with love, big dreams and even bigger emotions. If you’ve seen “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” it’s the kind of rom-com you might recognize, but told in a refreshingly unique way.
The story begins with Naveen (Karan Soni, “Deadpool”), a socially awkward doctor, taking a slow, disheartened bite into a samosa at his sister Arundhathi’s (Sunita Mani) wedding, clearly lost in his own thoughts as he wonders how his family will react to his version of the “big Indian wedding.” “They obviously know I’m gay; they just haven’t seen me be gay with another gay,” he reflects. Soon enough, though, they will.
Naveen’s “nice Indian boy,” Jay (Jonathan Groff), is a photographer who, though white, has embraced his Indian culture through his adoptive parents. Their first meeting takes place at a Hindu temple, and later, Jay unexpectedly shows up at the hospital to take Naveen’s new headshot. From there, their romance unfolds faster than even Naveen’s mother, Megha (comedian Zarna Garg in her first acting role) thinks gay romances usually do based on what she knows of them from the films she says she’s watched. Meanwhile, Naveen’s father, Archit (a quietly compelling Harish Patel), is navigating his own path toward accepting his son’s new relationship, though not in the way you might expect.
When “A Nice Indian Boy” premiered at SXSW in 2024, it garnered critical praise, with the film’s emotional depth reflecting the personal experiences shared by Soni and his longtime romantic partner, director Roshan Sethi. I recently spoke with Soni and Sethi about “A Nice Indian Boy” being a gay film you can watch with your mom, Soni’s extended sex scene with Groff that featured more “pounding,” and how this is a wedding movie that has the power to reach across the aisle.
How did your shorthand with each other as romantic partners influence the film?
Roshan Sethi: We know each other so intimately that we’re both very aware of what is each other’s best work. I know how fun he can be and I know how well he can act, so I’m constantly pushing him to whatever that is. But my sense of what is real for Karan is so skewed because I’m so attuned to any feeling of inauthenticity in his face. I also become, when I’m directing, overly emotionally codependent. So when he was acting in some of the sadder or more frustrated scenes, I got really scared that he was mad at me, but he was acting. [Laughs.] Then, it felt horrible watching him be angry or frustrated.
Karan Soni: You are leaving your trust in the director. A lot of times, I think actors can be defensive because they just don’t trust the person behind the camera. I trust Roshan. It’s so easy for me to act in things that he’s directing because that part of my brain shuts off.
The film pokes fun at gay film tropes before leaning into some of them. Was that intentional?
Sethi: Yeah. The whole movie is moving between two poles. One is the practical, almost cynical part of Karan, who is in a white coat in the hospital surrounded by sterile things, and more biological, logistical concerns. And then the vast, sweeping vision of Bollywood, which is, on one hand, completely ludicrous, but on the other very moving because it does feel like sometimes Bollywood is as vast and unfathomable as love itself.
One thing that’s interesting about Bollywood as a genre is it’s thoroughly unashamed of how over the top it is. There is no cultural respect for subtlety, which I think is good because there is none of the American reserve and restraint, none of the fear of sentimentality or emotion that sometimes makes it difficult for Americans to access their emotions in entertainment here. And growing up, especially in North America, I have such a mixed relationship with that. On one hand, I am still embarrassed and, on the other, I secretly crave it. So we’re trying to make the movie move between those things.
Soni, can you talk about the emotional depth Jonathan Groff brought into the story? How did having three queer men involved impact the romance, especially with the director being your partner?
Soni: Honestly, it’s so hard to make movies and specifically these kinds of stories are not the easiest things to make. So it took years for this movie to get made. Early on, people were like, will that be awkward? I think we both hadn’t really thought about that. We were just trying to get to the start line of filming, and then when we got there, everyone in the crew was like, “So is this going to be weird?” And suddenly, I think we hadn’t considered how awkward this could potentially be.
Luckily, Jonathan made us both feel so comfortable and is just the easiest person to get along with. When we were doing the sex scene, he literally just took charge of the entire thing and was like, “I know how this works. I’ve done it. I did ‘Looking.’” He made me feel comfortable — and he made the intimacy coordinator feel more comfortable because he just has no shame. She was taking notes! I remember when she came over to meet me and Jonathan in our chairs; he really locked eyes with her. She was sharing her life secrets with him.
Sethi: I’m a very jealous person, but I never felt jealous once watching the two of them. But I think it’s hard to be jealous of Jonathan — he’s so harmless. It sounds like the kind of insincere thing that you say when doing press about a coworker, but it literally is the case that Jonathan is the nicest man in the world. He is just dripping with sincerity and earnestness.
I heard there was a more explicit version early on before you decided to tone it down for family audiences. What was the original direction, and how did it change?
Sethi: The original scene is actually not that much more explicit. Basically in the existing sex scene that’s in the movie, you see [Jonathan’s] hand going down Karan’s back and then you see some heavy kissing and rolling around. What felt really romantic and sensual behind the curtain would transition to a hard cut of just rough pounding. It was meant to be a joke. It was like Bollywood, but then just pounding. But it felt like it undermined their connection to make it less romantic because the whole idea is that he’s not someone who thinks of his life in a Bollywood way, but the way that sex scene is shot seems so Bollywood that it seems to suggest that he’s finally opening himself up to that. So to do a hard cut to rough pounding felt like it was undermining an important thing.
That was the only reason it was cut. Nobody ever asked us to cut it, and we didn’t censor it for any other reason either. And it was important, obviously, to have a sex scene. There are so many explicit things in that movie that I’m still astonished they’re in there, like Peter [S. Kim, as Naveen’s friend Paul] talking about dick sizes and saying that big dicks are out, which is a crazy thing, obviously, to declare. And I don’t know what that is rooted in. And while he’s saying “we want tiny, modest dicks,” his hands are so far apart as if to demonstrate what tiny and modest look like.
Soni: In those scenes, the crassness actually feels nice and funny and everything, but in the romance, it felt like you’re betraying what the movie wants to be. We have such limited screen time before the family gets involved that we wanted their love to feel as romantic as possible. Then they’re going to be put through the parents’ meat grinder of expectations.
Sethi: At some point, we’ll release that extra scene of Jonathan just pounding away. [Laughs.]
Fans will be thrilled to hear that. The last third of the film is packed with complex cultural nuances that you pull off in such a short time. What does it mean to be part of a project that tackles queer themes within Indian culture and immigrant families?
Sethi: Both of us went through some rough periods when we were coming out. It’s not very easy to be gay and Indian, in general. I don’t think it’s easy to be gay and from a small evangelical Christian community in a small town, either. So it’s not so dissimilar from the American experience outside of the big metropolitan areas. But the hardest thing for my mom when I came out was to imagine a happy life full of family. For me, it was the hardest thing. She just could not imagine anything over than solitude [for me]. And the reason she couldn’t imagine it is, how could she? What is out there to lead her to believe that that is conceivable for her son? Why did her thoughts rotate around AIDS and solitude repeatedly over and over again? Because that’s what she had been led to believe was the only possibility for me. So the most powerful thing to me about the movie is that if I had had access to this movie, too — the idea of this movie — it would’ve maybe led me to not be closeted for 20 years.
Soni: Same thing. For me, what was special about this movie is that, again, with a lot of gay movies and TV shows, I don’t think I can watch any of them with my parents. “Looking,” for example. And so what ends up happening is that they end up being sheltered from that. They love watching films and TV, but they don’t usually see gay characters as the main characters because often in those shows, the sex scenes, or whatever it is, are too graphic for them to be invested.
What’s special about this movie is it invites everyone of every generation. Watching it at festivals leading up to the release now — so many people bring their parents. It’s this bonding experience. The parents don’t feel vilified and they kind of weirdly feel seen. The parents in the movie are some of the best characters and have these interesting arcs and layers, and they’re not just one-dimensional. I think what’s so special about the movie is that it kind of brings different generations together. And that’s what classic rom-coms and wedding movies have done for years, but they’ve just had straight people in them. So it felt very nice to have something that is quietly revolutionary, but also in a way feels old fashioned. That’s been the special thing of sharing the movie with audiences.
I love that the parents hysterically try to understand Naveen better by watching reality shows on OUTtv. Did that come from the experience of not having anything to watch that’s LGBTQ+ with your parents?
Soni: That’s very much my mom. [Laughs.]
Sethi: That’s his mom. And also we’re big fans of OUTtv. We watched the entire season of “For the Love of DILFs” before making this movie.
Soni: To be honest, we had never heard of OUTtv before “For the Love of DILFs.” And then one of our friends posted a story with a clip from that show, and we were like, “Is this the best reality show?”
Sethi: Then one of our assistant producers tracked them down. It’s not a big operation. And they were like, why would you want to license this footage? They had literally never been asked to license their footage ever before. And then we were like, we’re going to use it in a movie. They seemed indifferent, but we implied that the [“For the Love of DILFs”] twink is dead in the movie, and we did have to get his legal permission to claim he was dead because he’s not dead. He emailed us the other day and he was like, “A bunch of my friends said that they thought I was dead.” [Laughs.]
You might want to add something at the end of those credits before the film gets a wider release! Now, about Naveen’s sister — her situation was eye-opening. Naveen can break the rules by being gay, but she can’t when it comes to whom she marries. Can you talk about the importance of showing these family dynamics?
Sethi: The sister is actually the first character that the playwright [Madhuri Shekar] conceived of when she set out to write this story [the play was released in 2014], because she was imagining what it would be like if she married the nice Indian boy. Her parents were pressuring her to marry, and 10 years later, she was contemplating a divorce and felt trapped by their expectations. So, in some ways, it’s the most personal part of the whole thing, at least for her mother Shekar, who wrote the play. But yeah, it’s amazing to see the various ways in which they’re all trapped, and he’s trapped by certain expectations, and in some ways, they’re equally profound.
Soni: The whole movie is not a coming out story, but it’s what happens after all the layers of what it takes to introduce a partner to your family and how they have to acclimate at each step. One of those was for them to feel like the daughter is married off and happy, and that adds just such a layer. And then for that character, for Sunita [Mani’s] character, there’s just so much resentment, rightfully so, because the rules are different because she’s a woman.
Were there any other motifs or small details you included that you’re especially proud of?
Sethi: The biggest thing is really just the first time you meet the family around the dining table, there’s a lazy Susan panning shot that goes from one character to the other almost as if the camera is contained by them. And then that exact shot is repeated at the end of the movie, after they’ve gotten through everything. And after he accepts his son-in-law, that’s the pan that ends with the line, “Are there dates in this?” And I like the idea of beginning and ending with that and having it be the same shot and the same feeling.
And then the final scene in the movie is that they’re kissing, and they’re surrounded by their family in a way that is meant to visually echo those circles that came before. Because I love the idea that they are as on the nose as it is: They’re kissing, and they’re literally being embraced by their family around them. That is the dream. It’s so aspirational, at least for me. But that feeling — that the love could not only be allowed or permitted into a family, but held up by it and supported by it — is really meaningful.
What does it mean to send this film out into the world, knowing it’s so deeply tied to who you are?
Sethi: It feels so meaningful. I’m almost at a loss of words to say exactly what it feels like. Also, it has to be acknowledged that it’s especially odd to be releasing this movie, which was financed during a very progressive time, in a time that is much less progressive. So, what a strange movie to be sending out into Trump’s America in 2025. But I think it really is almost exactly what we need in some ways: to feel joy and acceptance and belonging and love and family is the emotion that I think our community is slowly being deprived of, especially in the next few years.
And we’re in a time where we’ve lost empathy for each other on both sides of the political spectrum. That’s obviously what leads to a never-ending fight — when you can’t understand or have empathy for the other person. [This] lack of understanding and empathy for immigrants, for gay and trans people — I think movies, in a way, are the only solution to that because movies force you to acknowledge the inner life of a person that you might not know. It’s such a small thing, but it’s also such a powerful thing. So, by generating that in our life, the movie is very useful for people on both sides of the political spectrum.
Soni: When I started in Hollywood in 2010, there were no real roles like this for me to be in, so it’s not lost on me. I feel so, so lucky to be in this — whatever part of Hollywood’s history this exists in, and that we got to make it. But the other thing that I’ve just been feeling grateful for is I feel very frustrated and stuck with how to help and what to do. It feels overwhelming with all of the stuff that’s been going around this year, but in a weird way, we made something that I think, if you watch, you’ll feel a little bit better about the world and people. It feels really nice to be putting out something that is just turning the dial toward a more positive, inclusive world.
