Aasif Mandvi on 'The Brink,' Turning Politics Into Comedy, and Regime Change at 'The Daily Show'

Aasif Mandvi is a natural fit for a stinging political satire like HBO’s The Brink (premiering this week); after all, he’s been gleefully poking fun at Washington for nine years now as a correspondent on The Daily Show. But acting is his first love, and he effectively gets the best of both worlds here: He co-stars as Pakistani driver Rafiq, who finds himself caught in a political firestorm alongside doofus American foreign service officer Alex (Jack Black)… and Mandvi is also a member of the show’s writing staff.

Yahoo TV chatted with Mandvi about his new series, and our conversation goes deep, spinning off into international politics, the effect that 9/11 had on the globe, and how accurate the show’s pitch-black perspective on government really is. Plus, he gives us an inside account of the regime change currently underway at The Daily Show, and tells us why he didn’t want to fill Jon Stewart’s shoes… or wear his underwear.

The ads for The Brink make it look like you might just be playing a wisecracking Pakistani driver — but Rafiq is actually a pivotal part of the show, right?
Yeah, the role kind of grew over time. When I first auditioned for it, it was literally a guest star. And then they turned it into a recurring, and then they turned it into a series regular. I think that initially, they had also written it as much younger. And when I auditioned for it, Jay Roach — who directed the pilot and also executive produced the show — it made a much more interesting story, he thought, if this Pakistani man was a contemporary of Jack’s, almost the same age, rather than him being much younger. And it actually gives it more conflict, and more of an interesting relationship between Alex and Rafiq.

The friendship between the two of them really grows… and also the antagonism between the two of them really grows. So it really becomes an Odd Couple kind of thing: the two of them thrown into this geopolitical crisis that’s happening, but really ending up as two people who are forced to get along with each other. So it became a classic sort of buddy comedy. If that was the only story on the show, it’d be like this buddy bromance road comedy. Very Hope and Crosby, kind of.

Yeah, you guys have great interplay together. Rafiq and Alex are sort of stuck together, whether they like it or not.
Right. Well, in the course of the first season, there’s a whole scenario that happens with a bunch of schoolgirls that we end up saving, and all this stuff. So there’s a whole series of stuff: Rafiq ends up being handcuffed to Alex, and then eventually realizes that this is exactly where he wants to be.

Jack and I actually have great chemistry together, so that really helped — you know, as two actors, working on this. I came into this like, Jack’s a movie star… but he’s actually the most down-to-earth guy, and very collaborative. I love to sort of rehearse and work out funny stuff and see what we can do, and he was so game for all of that. So we ended up with stuff that wasn’t even in the original script. And also, with me being in the writers’ room, it helped with me being able to help flesh out that story for the writers. To say, this is an interesting way to deal with this story.

Yeah, you’re in the writers’ room, too, so you’re integral to crafting this story, as well as acting in it.
Yeah, and I didn’t want [Rafiq] to end up being the typical sort of Pakistani servant character, you know? That’s offensive on many levels. [Laughs.] And it starts out in that place, and ends up going somewhere else. And also, it’s about playing off this idea of a man who, because of his circumstance in life, because of the geopolitics of the world, he’s forced to take this job as a driver. But he’s actually overqualified to be a driver. And Alex has gotten this job as a foreign services guy, but he’s incredibly underqualified to have that position.

Alex should be driving Rafiq around.
Exactly! It’s sort of like, here’s this guy who’s overqualified and doesn’t have the status, but Alex, because he’s a white American guy, got this job, but he’s severely underqualified for that position, you know?

Alex is this “ugly American” who doesn’t really have a clue about what life is like in Pakistan. But how does Rafiq view Americans? He’s taken this job as a driver for the U.S. government, but like you said, he obviously aspires to more.
I mean, Rafiq is not a revolutionary, in the sense that he’s not like, “Oh, I don’t want to work for the Americans.” He sees the opportunity. But I also think that he has a very specific position. The great thing is, we made sure that Rafiq’s family was an intellectual family, an academic family. His uncle is a psychologist; his father is a writer… and so he comes from an upper-class family where there’s commentary on not only Pakistani politics, but on American foreign policy. And so that idea is woven through the season; you see that he does have an opinion about America, and America’s role in that part of the world.

It’s a bit unusual to see these very serious political issues being addressed in a comedy. It kind of plays like Homeland, but if Homeland were a comedy.
[Laughs.] Yeah, I’ve often said that about this show: It’s kind of if Homeland or 24 were a comedy, it would be The Brink. And that’s what I think makes it so unique, and so interesting, is that we haven’t seen that, really, not since M*A*S*H, a comedy that’s dealing with such serious subject matter, you know? So I think it’s exciting.

For me, the reason I was interested in doing The Brink was that it felt to me like an extension of what I was doing on The Daily Show for nine years: using satire to address issues. But on The Daily Show, the news and current events are our raw material through which we then use satire to comment on that. Whereas with The Brink, we’re using a narrative and creating a narrative storyline, which for me is going back to where I came from: more traditional acting stuff. So for me, it was exciting because it was dealing with the geopolitics, but through characters and story and narrative.

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Yeah, The Daily Show gave you a great background for that, obviously. Were you a news junkie before you started on that show, or did The Daily Show expose you to that?
I wasn’t a news junkie before that, really. When I got on The Daily Show, I was sort of thrown into the midst of the news. I mean, I watched The Daily Show, and got all my news from The Daily Show before I was on it. [Laughs.] But it was kind of that thing where… two events happened. One was, for me, when 9/11 happened, and that politicized everything. It changed America, but it especially changed America for people who came from a Muslim background. So that was the first step.

And then five years later, when I got on The Daily Show, that was the second step of me being able to sort of speak into the zeitgeist and realize there’s something I wanted to say, and there’s a platform here. I didn’t set off as an actor to be political, or talk about things. I just wanted to be an actor. When I went to school, it was just about getting work. At the heart of it, I always am an actor. But The Daily Show did make me aware of that part of myself, of really wanting to say something.

So this feels like it’s a marriage of the two things. You’re not dealing with the day’s news, or even the week’s news, but you are telling a story, and through that story, you can address certain hypocrisies of the way our media and government work.

So are you the person in the writers’ room they look to if they want to make something politically accurate, since you’re on The Daily Show? You probably also have consultants and advisors who know the region.    
Yeah, no, I’m not the person they go to for that. I would Google it. [Laughs.] We have people who will actually go and look up stuff and make sure, and then we have Roberto Benabib, who’s the showrunner. They’ve also employed people who work within government, and they’re helping us with accuracy around that stuff. A lot of people who have seen the pilot and are connected to Washington, they say that it depicts it in a way that’s obviously satirical, but… a lot of that stuff does go on, you know?

The show takes a pretty cynical view of government and the military: Tim Robbins’s character would rather be off with escorts, Jack Black’s would rather be smoking weed. Everybody in the government hates their job, basically.
Uh, yeah. I mean, listen, it’s definitely fueled by narcissism and a certain level of ineptitude, you know? But I don’t know if that’s that different than government for real. If you look around Washington D.C., it’s not that different than Hollywood. For as long as I’ve worked on The Daily Show, you start to realize that politicians are often not that different than people who just make their living playing a role.

You mentioned this earlier, but one of the things I liked about the show is Rafiq’s family, and how they’re a nice, upper-class Pakistani family that exchanges ideas. We’re getting a view of what domestic life is like in Pakistan, which we don’t get a lot of on American TV.
No, we don’t, and I think that was a very conscious decision: to show this Pakistani family to be a family who — and I use this word ironically for Americans — but they are “normal.” You know what I mean? And that is to say that often there’s the idea that what America is is normal, and everyone else is a little weird, you know? So we wanted to portray a family that Americans could look at and be like, “It’s normal, oh my gosh! They’re even actually smarter than us.”

That was the other thing: Rafiq’s family is actually smarter than most Americans. And that is true, I think, about the rest of the world. This idea that people are living in this abject ignorance and poverty in the rest of the world is just not true. I think that people in Iran and the Middle East are much more educated about global politics than the average American. Because they’re on the other side of those drones, you know what I mean? [Laughs.] They’re the people who are on the other side of drones and bombs and American sanctions and all that stuff. So they do know about it. They know how the world works in a way that Americans sometimes don’t.

And I don’t blame Americans, because they don’t have to. And our media doesn’t take the time to actually give us perspective on these things. Our media is often just sort of waving the flag and talking about how great America is, you know? America is the most self-congratulatory country in the world.

Like you said, 9/11 brought this political awareness to Americans, but it’s still not affecting us on a daily basis in the way that it is in Pakistan or other parts of the world.
Yeah, that’s what I mean: It’s like people keep telling you how 9/11 changed America. And it did. But 9/11 affected the average citizen in the Middle East or in Europe much more than it has affected the average citizen in America.

You were born in India, but you’re playing a Pakistani here, and that’s something that unfortunately gets conflated a lot in Hollywood. Have you had times where producers call you in for a role, and you get the sense that they don’t know the difference between those two countries?
Well, here’s the thing: I am Indian, but I’m also from a Muslim family in India. And Pakistan and India used to be the same country, and essentially, there are a lot of similarities between them. Where it gets tricky is when you have Iranians playing Pakistanis, you know? Or where you have people who are European playing Saudi Arabians, you know what I mean? [Laughs.] It always seemed weird to me that a light-skinned Indian guy could not play a Caucasian, but a dark-skinned Caucasian could totally play an Indian guy.

Are you still with The Daily Show? Or have you left for this show?
I am, but I’m really very much on a part-time basis right now, because I really just have been doing so many other things. Obviously, I’m living in L.A. and working on The Brink. So yeah, I work on The Daily Show when I’m available, as needed. I think myself and Al Madrigal have this part-time gig right now with The Daily Show.

So have they started the changeover already? Has Trevor Noah come in and started working with you guys?
Well, Trevor’s been there; he’s on and off. He’s also traveling, doing his own stuff. But he’s kind of been coming in and out. I don’t know how much time he’s actually spent at the show right now, but Jon’s not leaving till August, so I imagine there will be a period of time for him to change over. And Trevor’s been at the show, so he knows how the show works. And I think he’ll probably be spending more time as we get closer to the departure date.

Did you have any interest in hosting The Daily Show? Or do you feel like acting is more of your main calling?
I mean, I never really campaigned to be the host of The Daily Show. It wasn’t something where… first of all, I have a gig, which is The Brink. So I wasn’t really available. And the second thing was, I’m an actor. I want to act, I want to produce, I want to write more narrative stuff.

And thirdly, if I was to host a satirical, comedic talk show… I don’t think I would want to step into the Daily Show chair. [Laughs.] I would want to do that somewhere else, fresh. Like what Samantha Bee is going to do. She’s going to go off and have her own show on TBS. Or the way [John] Oliver did it. I didn’t want to try to fill Jon’s shoes, or step into those shoes, however you phrase it. Sit in his chair. Wear his underwear. [Laughs.]

The Brink premieres Sunday, June 21 at 10:30 p.m. on HBO.