You may know Aziz Ansari best as the man who taught you to “treat yo’ self” over the course of seven seasons on "Parks And Recreation," but he also won multiple Emmys for "Master Of None," the brilliant show that spent three seasons on the Netflix schedule between 2015 and 2021. "Master Of None" was both a critical and commercial success, marking a turning point in Ansari’s career as the industry began to take him more seriously as a writer. Now he’s moving into the world of features with his upcoming film "Good Fortune."
Unsurprisingly, there are some major ways in which the new movie was inspired by the stories he was telling on Netflix all those years ago. I recently spoke with Ansari to celebrate the upcoming release of "Good Fortune," and when I mentioned "Master Of None," he answered in kind.
00:00Well, you're right. There's definitely some DNA of mastermind in this with the stuff with me and my dad. And, you know, there was an episode we did called I Love New York where we followed people like there was a taxi driver, a doorman, and a woman who was deaf.
00:16And in this, it's kind of like, oh, you're kind of going into a different world with Arj, a guy who's, you know, working at a hardware heaven, Home Depot type store and doing this kind of task rabbit kind of thing.
00:26So there's kind of this kind of putting yourself in other people's shoes element. I mean, what was different is obviously the whole angel thing and having Keanu's character and this kind of, you know, there were times when Alan Yang, who created Master Nun with me, we were talking about the script in early stages and they're like, should we do the whole angel thing?
00:42And we always were like, no, we have to do the angel thing because that's what's different and that's what makes it a different swing than Master Nun and it kind of makes it a little more fun and exciting.
00:51So that whole element and obviously Keanu Reeves was never in Master Nun, but you want to know a fun factoid that I just realized is in that episode where I was talking about, about there's a cab drivers and the cab drivers are talking about whether they ever picked up any famous passengers.
01:14And one guy says, I picked up Keanu Reeves and the other guys are like, no way you didn't. He probably takes Uber. And, and then this movie has Keanu Reeves. Who would have known?
01:25Dude, I thought about that.
01:26Really? You caught that? I didn't think about that till way later. Like after I remembered that and I'm like, that's so weird. That's like a, you know.
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