Series creator and writer Abdullah Saeed, along with Asif Ali, Saagar Shaikh, Poorna Jagannathan of 'Deli Boys,' drop in at our studio in Park City to talk about the importance of cultural pride and representation that has gone into creating their Hulu series.
00:00I was given a gift and I will keep wearing it until the day I die.
00:03He also just doesn't own another jacket.
00:06Yeah, what if I told you I had a very slim closet?
00:08He came to Sundance with this as his puffer.
00:12This is from the camera. This is a gift from the camera department.
00:14Shout out Drew Weed.
00:17And that whole team, they made these for us and it's not often you get like a wrap gift that's actually something you would want to wear.
00:25Look at the back. Look at this.
00:27So that actually, in fact, what that is, is the mural outside of the deli.
00:33The tiger is the Darko symbol.
00:40I came up with these two guys as sort of like two halves of not only my personality, but anyone with immigrant roots, right?
00:47Has that side of their mind that's like, oh, OK, I should honor my parents and all their struggle and hard work, you know, coming to this country.
00:56Or the other half, which is like, I should enjoy the fruits of their labor and that just be like a heatness.
01:01And I thought it'd be interesting to externalize that conversation, honestly, just as a mechanism for jokes.
01:07Right. Which is the most important thing.
01:10In life. Yes.
01:11Yeah. And so, you know, but once these characters start to exist like that on the page.
01:16Right. Like I knew that it was working for me and I really liked it, but it was when other people started reading it and being like, wow, like there's really something here like behind the words they're saying, the things they're doing that feels like they're real.
01:29You know, and then, of course, like the convenience store aspect, my family has historically owned a lot of franchise businesses, like a lot of Pakistani and Indian immigrants to this country.
01:39Right. And it's something that is seen as a point of embarrassment or as a point of like, oh, that's like a thing to make fun of, like a weird stereotype.
01:48But honestly, like I was like, I worked the counter at a 7-Eleven, you know, at a convenience store and I had a good time.
01:55Famously so.
01:56Yeah. Right. And I did my job. I did my thing. I had some interesting experiences. Right.
02:02None quite like what you end up seeing in the show, but where that comes from.
02:07So I was essentially like, I want to retake this stereotype. Right.
02:11Set in Philadelphia. And there are no bodegas in Philadelphia. We're from Philadelphia.
02:16Yeah. So I think not bodegas and not, what's that? Corner store.
02:21Corner store. Or convenience store.
02:22Convenience store. Corner store. Corner store is a different.
02:25Do you guys call stores Wawa's or is that only Delaware?
02:28No, Wawa is a specific drink.
02:31Yeah. We used to call them a stab and grab, too, which is like a random term for it, but yes.
02:38They're delis or stab and grabs.
02:40Yeah.
02:41Yeah, but I mean, always, I think like, I think it's also...
02:44Stab and grab.
02:45BDs didn't really work.
02:46Also, convenience stores, right? Like, they're ABC delis, but the C stands for convenience, right?
02:53Yeah, exactly.
02:55Yeah, I grew up in a gas station family. My dad worked at one until I was like 11, and then he bought his own.
03:03And yeah, I say convenience store.
03:06Oh.
03:07So this is the Texas vernacular.
03:09Yeah, yeah.
03:10Interesting.
03:10You know, we pitched it to a lot of places. A lot of places passed on it. And then we pitched it to one last place that happened to be Onyx Collective.
03:19And it's a place that's filled with black and brown people with diverse voices. And I felt right at home, honestly.
03:27You know, like, after getting all those passes, I feel like in that pitch, like, I had let everything go.
03:33You know, so I wasn't so like, oh, you know. And I think that probably helped. And then once we were in, you know, I found myself at times being like, all right, explaining, right?
03:41Like, okay, so, you know, South Asians are this, there's pocket-sized Indians. And a lot of the people I work with at 20th and at Onyx are like, yeah, we know.
03:49So, you know, it's like.
03:51Which is not a common thing.
03:52Yeah, right?
03:53And it saves so much energy, you know, in terms of having to frame things for people. So, you know, Anil, our, you know, main exec at Onyx, he's a brown dude. He's an Indian American dude.
04:06Like, I don't have to explain every little thing to him. Like, he gets it. You know what I mean? Which has been really cool.
04:12And also Onyx, like Tara Duncan said, I want stories that are really ordinary. That's, you know, the fact that they're being told by brown and black people.
04:21Like, the fact that we are a Delhi family, but dealing cocaine. Like, that is the extraordinary part. But it's an ordinary story.
04:30Right, right. It's not special because we're brown. We just happen to be brown.
04:34That's right. It's not centered on identity. It's not centered off like a coming. It's nothing. It is just a fucking funny show.
04:43And it's ordinary and it's fantastic.
04:45Was there anything that you, like, wrote into the script that then became a challenge to, like, realize?
04:53I was thinking about this. It's not, it wasn't the blood so much as the vomit.
04:58I was just that, too.
04:59I got the vomit.
05:00Your vomit thing was something that was so far, much more violent than anything that I'd ever seen.
05:07That was crazy.
05:09Yeah, seeing playback on that was like, yikes.
05:11Yeah, it was so funny.
05:12And he, like, he projected Alabama's onto his crotch.
05:16It's so much.
05:18The story is that it's so much vomit.
05:22Like, it's not projected.
05:23It's not like whatever, right?
05:24It is like a bucket of vomit.
05:26But both these two have apparently vomited like that.
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