Aasif Mandvi
Aasif Mandvi
Aasif Hakim Mandviwala, known professionally as Aasif Mandvi, is an Indian-American actor and comedian. He began appearing as an occasional contributing correspondent on The Daily Show on August 9, 2006. On March 12, 2007, he was promoted to a regular correspondent. He is the lead actor, co-writer and producer of the web series Halal In The Family which premiered on "Funny or Die" in 2015 and an actor, writer and co-producer of the HBO comedy series The Brink. Mandvi is...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionMovie Actor
Date of Birth5 March 1966
CountryIndia
In Britain, you never get away from the fact that you're a foreigner. In the U.S., the view is it doesn't matter where you come from.
Voter fraud does just barely exist, while racism, according to the Supreme Court, is a thing of the past.
I've always said I'm the worst representative of Muslim-Americans that's ever existed, because I've been inside more bars than mosques.
I'm not really a food connoisseur.
I'm Muslim the way many of my Jewish friends are Jewish: I avoid pork, and I take the big holidays off.
In America, you have this kind of individualism and in the West, essentially, you have this individualism - this idea of my own personal fulfillment.
I was born in India - but never really lived there.
It's an organic thing that I try not to analyze too much, because I worry that it will go away.
So I had this completely unrealistic idea of what America was — but I wanted to be there.
When I was 11 my friend's mom made a peanut butter sandwich. I ate the sandwich and was like, 'I'm never eating anything else again.' And I still eat peanut butter every day. I would put peanut butter on a steak.
When my family decided to leave England I could not have been happier. I was sort of like - America seemed like the land of opportunity and, you know, it was Hollywood to me.
Re-colonizing it and sort of reverse-colonizing it to the point that today the national dish of Great Britain is Chicken Tikka Masala.
I said we are Ghodratis and there's nothing that Ghodratis like more than a bargain.
For my parents it was all about getting a deal, my dad came to America and he heard of this concept of brunch. He didn't quite know what it was. And he thought it was this other meal that existed between breakfast and lunch. He was kind of like - I remember he sort of was like America has so much food that between breakfast and lunch they have to stop and eat again. They have brunch. It was completely legal it was, like, a legal meal that you could have. I mean, clearly it wasn't the only reason he came to America, but I think it certainly sweetened the pot for him.