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Aasif Mandvi, a Chamberlain High graduate and onetime USF acting student, got his big break in a movie with a quality pedigree. And almost no one's seen it.
By STEVE PERSALL, Times Film Critic
© St. Petersburg Times, published October 27, 2002
Former Tampa resident Aasif Mandvi isn't surprised that his first leading role in a feature film is a labor of unappreciated love.
Esoteric films such as The Mystic Masseur fall through the cracks of movie distribution all the time. Ismail Merchant's adaptation of V.S. Naipaul's novel about a Hindu writer in Trinidad debuted in May on two screens, received mixed reviews and earned less than $400,000 in box office receipts in very limited release.
The Mystic Masseur finally gets a local engagement, at Tampa Theatre, beginning today, after six months and several postponements. There is no apparent rush to get the movie to home video. Who would buy it?
"When I read the script, I knew it wasn't going to be a Big Fat Greek Wedding, you know? But for me it was pretty much a no-brainer," said Mandvi, a 1984 graduate of Chamberlain High School who cut his acting chops in the University of South Florida theater program.
The Mystic Masseur features Mandvi as Ganesh, a quiet schoolteacher whose writings propel him to a political puppet's role during English colonization in the 1950s. Not exactly blockbuster material. Merchant is the producer half of the artful Merchant-Ivory collaborations (Howards End, The Remains of the Day) with director James Ivory. Merchant's previous work as a director, Cotton Mary (1999), made less money than The Mystic Masseur.
"The thing about Hollywood is that people don't have to see a movie, they just need to have heard about it," Mandvi said. "Most people won't see your movie. But Merchant-Ivory has a reputation that precedes them. For me to be involved with them certainly gives me a certain cache that I didn't have before.
"Regardless of how well the film does, I'm thankful for the opportunity. It was really educational for me as an actor to carry a film and what that takes. It's a whole different set of skills rather than just coming in, doing your turn and leaving. Being the spine of the story was an invaluable education for me."
That's a change from his regular gig. Since February, Mandvi has played peddler Ali Hakim in the Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma. A Broadway musical role was the last thing he expected after completing The Mystic Masseur and the first thing he was offered.
"I came back from Trinidad, dropped my bags in New York and went straight to L.A. thinking, well, this is the beginning of my super-duper movie career," Mandvi said. "I was driving around L.A. waiting for the phone to ring, and it did ring. It was my agent saying I had an audition back in New York for Oklahoma."
Mandvi returned to Manhattan, where he had lived since leaving Florida in 1991. After graduating from USF, he worked as a street performer and improvisational comedian at the Disney and Universal theme parks in Orlando. Mandvi bounced around New York regional theaters until he became an understudy in Eric Bogosian's SubUrbia at Lincoln Center. Small roles in the films The Siege and Analyze This played on his Indian appearance.
Meanwhile, Mandvi performed standup comedy "for face recognition" and began developing characters based on his Indian-Muslim family background: "very Leguizamoesque," he described it, referring to the routines of actor-comedian John Leguizamo. His acting teacher, Wynn Handman, was also artistic director at American Place Theatre. After two years, Handman believed Mandvi had enough material for a one-man show eventually titled Fakina's Restaurant, staged at Handman's theater for six months.
"We had a hard time getting the New York Times to come down and review it," Mandvi said. "Everybody had come to review it except the Times. After we were running about six weeks, the Times reviewed it. That's when Merchant saw the show."
The Bombay-born filmmaker enjoyed Fakina's Restaurant and met Mandvi after the performance with an invitation to dinner and a movie role.
"It's funny, because he didn't really offer me a role, he just said, 'I have this film script I want you to read,' " Mandvi said. "I was, like, 'All right, well, I'll tell you what I think.' Over the course of the next year or so we kind of talked back and forth."
Still, Mandvi hadn't heard Merchant say what he wanted to hear.
"He's very elusive," the actor said. "You can't pin him down to anything. He kept sending me drafts of the script, and finally I called him in Paris and asked him: 'Are you offering me this role?' He was like: 'Yes, absolutely!' in his kind of flamboyant way, like he had been saying it all along. I told him, 'I'm going to invest in this role now if you tell me I've got the part.' He said: 'Invest! Invest!' "
Mandvi started by reading Naipaul's novel, envisioning Ganesh's reactions to celebrity in a land under British control. A year passed before filming began in Trinidad and Mandvi saw what Naipaul wrote about.
"Getting to Trinidad taught me so much about this character, finally landing there and seeing the landscape and the country," he said. "To me, he's a character who's essentially an artist seduced by his own need for success. He's also very smart, kind of Machiavellian. It's kind of tragic because at the end he rises to the level of his incompetence."
The competence of Merchant's film has sunk to the level of inconsequence, except for an ambitious actor believing it's a beginning.
"Ultimately I feel I did the best work I could and was given an opportunity to perform a role that very few actors at my level where I was at that time would be given," Mandvi said. "I gladly take the lessons and the somewhat notoriety, and I run with it to the next project and on to the rest of my career."