Kumail Nanjiani

Kumail Nanjiani was born in Karachi and came to American comedy through stand-up, which still shapes everything he does on screen: he times a line like a man who has spent years learning to respect a silence.

Silicon Valley, where he played Dinesh Chugtai from 2014 to 2019, made him famous and fixed the persona in place: a man whose vanity is permanently at war with his competence, losing status contests that he started himself. It is a great sitcom performance and a narrow one. The Big Sick, in 2017, showed the rest. He co-wrote it with his wife Emily V. Gordon out of their own courtship, and the two of them were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Playing a version of yourself while your girlfriend is unconscious for half the running time is harder than it looks, and he does it by refusing to make himself sympathetic.

Since then he has occupied the awkward middle of the industry: a place in the Eternals ensemble, an Emmy nomination for an episode of The Twilight Zone, voice leads in Migration and Men in Black: International, and prestige television in Welcome to Chippendales and Only Murders in the Building. His accolades include a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Independent Spirit Award, and Time listed him among its hundred most influential people in 2018. The pattern is frustrating: the studio work keeps hiring the persona rather than the writer, and the best thing he has made is still the one he wrote himself.