Rahul Kohli
Rahul Kohli is an actor, born 1985.
Rahul Kohli worked his way through British television before an American network handed him the part that fit. Ravi Chakrabarti, the medical examiner in iZombie from 2015 to 2019, had the hardest job on a genre show, which is explaining the premise every week while sounding like a man enjoying his life. The role established the register Kohli is best in, warm and fast and faintly amused, and it is why directors keep casting him as the one decent person in the room.
Mike Flanagan noticed. Kohli has now appeared in three of his Netflix series, as Owen Sharma in The Haunting of Bly Manor, Sheriff Hassan in Midnight Mass and Napoleon Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher. He also turns up in The Midnight Club. Midnight Mass is the one that showed range: Hassan is the sheriff and the conspicuous outsider in a community closing ranks, and Kohli plays him with a tiredness the rest of his work rarely asks for.
Elsewhere he is a dependable ensemble hire rather than a lead. He is Charles Bantam in Citadel, Sunil Ranja in Death and Other Details, Ed in We Were Liars, Miles Watlow in The Electric State, and a small part in The Life of Chuck. He also works steadily as a voice actor, including the Scarecrow in Harley Quinn and roles in Twilight of the Gods and The Mighty Nein, and an Amazon adaptation of Carrie is ahead of him. The screen career is still shorter than the goodwill attached to it.
Movies (7)
TV (13)
Where to start with Rahul Kohli
Begin with Midnight Mass. It asks him for grief, restraint and a slow accumulation of anger, none of which his comic register prepares you for, and he carries an entire strand of the series on it. Then go backwards to iZombie, which is lighter, longer and the better argument for his charm, four years of a man making autopsy exposition sound like good company.
After that, the Flanagan shelf: The Haunting of Bly Manor for the gentlest thing he has done, The Fall of the House of Usher for the nastiest. Harley Quinn proves the voice work is not a sideline, and Next Exit is the small independent film worth hunting down if you want him without a genre apparatus built around him.