Aziz Ansari Isn’t Taking Hollywood’s S**t

Aziz Ansari was on point and out for blood after the screening of his new Netflix series, Master of None, at EW Fest on Saturday. He spoke about making the show and how much the industry sucks for anyone darker than coffee creamer with his trademark cutting humor.

There are literally so few older Indian actors in Hollywood that he cast his parents to play themselves. His mom was reluctant at first:

“No, I don’t want people recognizing me and asking me for selfies.”

She said, only to agree at the last minute. That’s pretty goddamn adorable. Aziz dishes on the show and his own experiences. In one episode:

“…You see a montage of every Indian character that I remember seeing growing up. And it’s just: gas station, gas station, gas station, gas station, weird guy from Indiana Jones who eats brains, Zack Morris making some sort of curry joke. And it ends with Ashton Kutcher’s Pop Chips commercial where he dons brownface and is a Bollywood producer named Raj.”

Ouch. Hollywood is a literal disaster. Aziz even turned down a role in the 2007 Transformers film. Wanna guess what role they offered him? A call center guy with an accent. Of course. Aziz fully let his frustration with the industry blizzard be known. He created Master of None because getting interesting and humanized roles in Hollywood is almost impossible if you’re not mayo as hell.

“Look, if you’re a minority actor, no one would have wrote this show for you. No one would have been like, Hey, how about we get Aziz to do this ten-episode show and have [him] play this thoughtful character. At best, they would just write something that’s a character based on the qualities people have seen already, like Tom [Haverford].”

We gonna address Hollywood’s inability to accept the humanity and complexity of people that aren’t white 99% of the time, or nah? You tell ’em Aziz.