Yes, My Accent Is Real by Kunal Nayyar

years.
    The first adjudicator cleared his throat. “I’d like to begin by discussing the play’s realism.” He looked down at his notes. “As an example, let’s take the case of the butler. Played by . . . COOONEL?” He looked toward me. “It’s like he’s in an entirely different world. Let’s just take one specific moment where COOONEL is surprised by something, and he makes an Ooooohh sound, and then he turns around and says the same thing to the other side of the stage. No one would ever do that.”
    The second judge spoke up. “I had an issue with the way people were talking to each other. Let’s just take, as an example,” he said, flipping through his notes, “KAANAL. I don’t understand why he’s talking louder than everyone else. It just takes me out of this world.”
    The third judge frowned, glancing down at his notes. “I, too, had a problem with the play’s realism. Just as one example . . . COOONEL. I’m sorry to harp on you, but—”
    And so it continued. The judges ripped the play and they shredded me to pieces. We filed out of the auditorium, and no one talked to me about the comments. No one accused me of botching the play, no one said they were upset with me, no one talked to me about my “realism.” This is because no one talked to me, period. I was left alone. Everyone went out and partied and I returned to my hotel room.
    Was I the reason we didn’t advance to the finals? It’s hard to say.Maybe my performance really was so awful that it handicapped our chances. Or maybe the judges hated pretty much everything about the play and I’m only remembering the notes directed at me.
    Over the years I’ve thought about this a lot, and about how, as an actor, there are so many things out of your control. For example, let’s just say you’re an actor and you book your dream TV role. You’re about to show up for your first day of production, and then the executive producer, after googling you, sees that you’re thirty-two but they have cast you as a twenty-three-year-old. This puts a tiny poisonous thought in his head, and he makes a phone call to the studio head. The studio head says, “Who cares, he looks twenty-three and that’s all that counts.” And then the studio head tells his wife about it at dinner while eating sushi, and the wife says, well, maybe the audience will find out that he really is thirty-two and that could lead to teenage girls finding him too old. That tiny poisonous thought has now worked its way from executive producer to studio head to his wife’s head and back into the studio head’s head. And it is not such a tiny thought any longer. So when the studio head goes to sleep that night, he has a dream that the reviews for his new show—his baby—are mostly positive, except the reviews all said the same thing: the actor is thirty-two, and this led to the audience becoming so outraged that they staged a protest and marched upon the studio, leading to the studio head’s downfall and eventual early demise.
    So the next day . . . you’re fired, even though you really were great in the part and do look twenty-three.
    Things have to align themselves so perfectly in our universe for actors to make a paycheck. Maybe this was how my Ring Around the Moon castmates felt—that I wasthe wild card that cost them their ticket to the finals, that I was the one variable out of their control. I don’t know.
    What I do know is that once those notes finally sank in, once I internalized what had happened, I didn’t feel bad for myself anymore. I didn’t mope. I knew that a great deal of investment and sacrifice had gone into me coming to this country, and I simply just didn’t have the luxury or the time to feel sorry for myself.
    I accepted I was not a good actor.
    And I resolved one thing: I need to