Poorna Jagannathan, dressed in a prim, black Stella McCartney jumpsuit, her wildly curly hair slicked back into a bun, was seated outside her favorite restaurant, in Manhattan\u2019s NoLIta neighborhood, chatting about menopause.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I told my mum I was going through menopause, she said, \u2018It\u2019s OK, it\u2019ll be over in one day,\u2019\u201d she recalled.<\/p>\n
Jagannathan, 53, then raised her eyebrows and her hands in the air and, with perfect comic timing, added: \u201cI have no idea what she\u2019s talking about, because I\u2019m in year three of absolute hell.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was the kind of wry and refreshingly honest remark that the actress is known for among close friends \u2014 like the actress Sarita Choudhury, with whom she was having lunch \u2014 but a side of her personality that viewers rarely saw onscreen. That is, until her most recent role as the cunning mob boss Lucky Auntie in the Hulu series \u201cDeli Boys,\u201d<\/a> which released its second season in May. The show follows a drug trafficking enterprise run out of a Philadelphia convenience store.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a pivotal role for Jagannathan, known in part for her characters in \u201cNever Have I Ever\u201d and \u201cWolfs,\u201d because it\u2019s a departure from the clich\u00e9d doctor or meek mother molds she played earlier in her career. But it\u2019s also one that, she said, she probably couldn\u2019t have inhabited before perimenopause.<\/p>\n One benefit of her 50s is that they come with \u201ca really weird mind set shift,\u201d Jagannathan continued. She finally understands what it means not to care about certain things, especially others\u2019 opinions, she said, using far more colorful words than The New York Times would print.<\/p>\n The self-assurance, Jagannathan added, \u201cjust washes over you.\u201d<\/p>\n During a break in Jagannathan\u2019s hectic press schedule, she sat in on a class at the Barrow Group acting school, where she learned her craft; got her hair cut by her longtime stylist; and caught up with Choudhury at the restaurant Epistrophy, where they have been meeting since it opened over two decades ago \u2014 when both of them were pregnant.<\/p>\n As they shared plates of tagliatelle, burrata and endive salad, they reminisced over memories of rehearsing lines together in one corner of the restaurant, and doing their laundry at the laundromat next door.<\/p>\n At the exact moment of an interview with this Times reporter, another friend happened to be driving by and called out to say hello: The comedian and producer Ramy Youssef. He honked and rolled down his window to get her attention.<\/p>\n \u201cGet out!\u201d she ordered Youssef. \u201cPull over!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI can\u2019t!\u201d he shouted back, before driving away.<\/p>\n Jagannathan got back to chatting about the impostor syndrome she would have felt had she played Lucky Auntie, who guns down opponents with the ease of a hair flick and plays the incompetent men around her like pawns, earlier in her career. \u201cI would have really been faking it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Choudhury nodded knowingly. \u201cPower roles are so tough,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Acting was not Jagannathan\u2019s first career. She moved to New York in the 1990s to work at the advertising agencies Chiat\/Day and then Ogilvy. Her work involved frequent presentations in front of audiences \u2014 something that was extremely difficult because of her stage fright \u2014 so she signed up for weekend acting classes to overcome the fear of public speaking.<\/p>\n The classes did much more, offering glimpses of a new life path. In 2001, she quit her job and signed up for more classes, renting out rooms in her apartment and doing freelance advertising to make ends meet. \u201cI put a tiny curtain up and sectioned off a tiny part of the living room where I lived,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n One of her first Hollywood roles came in 2006 when she played a minor character in \u201cLaw & Order\u201d named Dr. Sikh, which is an absurd name, she pointed out, because Sikh refers to followers of Sikhism; it\u2019s the equivalent of naming a character Dr. Catholic. But she didn\u2019t feel she had the authority to bring it up and, for years, was cast in similar roles \u201cwith no real flesh underneath,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n As a South Indian woman starting an acting career in her mid-30s, Jagannathan found that casting directors \u201cdidn\u2019t know what to do with me,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n In 2016, Jagannathan was at an advertising conference when she got a call from her agent: She had booked what would become a breakout role on the critically acclaimed HBO series \u201cThe Night Of.\u201d<\/p>\n A longtime colleague, Mick McCabe, recalled her leaving the conference and her advertising career behind that day: \u201cWe were like, \u2018You gotta go now?\u2019\u201d McCabe said, \u201cand she was like, \u2018I gotta go now.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n In the two decades since Jagannathan got her start, Hollywood has awakened to the fact that stories with people of color in lead roles \u2014 as three-dimensional characters \u2014 resonate with audiences. By the time Jagannathan appeared in 2019 as Dr. Nalini Vishwakumar in Mindy Kaling\u2019s hit coming-of-age series \u201cNever Have I Ever,\u201d viewers had seen movies like \u201cCrazy Rich Asians\u201d and shows like \u201cMaster of None\u201d garner critical success. Jagannathan felt more empowered to weigh in on character lines, costumes and even onscreen meals.<\/p>\n The variety of characters she has played in the last five years is a testament to the fact that \u201cshe breaks out of boxes no matter the role, no matter the form,\u201d New York\u2019s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who is a friend of Jagannathan\u2019s, said in an email. In 2019, Jagannathan had helped Mamdani connect with the Indian celebrity chef Madhur Jaffrey for one of his rap music videos<\/a>. She defies boundaries offscreen, as well: \u201cI feel like Poorna would slap me if I called her an auntie,\u201d he wrote. \u201cShe\u2019s more like my cool older cousin.\u201d<\/p>\n Case in point: Lucky Auntie was initially written as a male character, but after the show\u2019s creator, Abdullah Saeed, watched \u201cNever Have I Ever,\u201d he turned the uncle into an auntie and didn\u2019t need anyone else to audition.<\/p>\n In the second season of \u201cDeli Boys,\u201d Jagannathan gets to be part of something that has also been rare in her career: a full romance plot, with Max Sugar, a casino owner played by Fred Armisen.<\/p>\n As she put it: Auntie \u201cgets to boink!\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Poorna Jagannathan, dressed in a prim, black Stella McCartney jumpsuit, her wildly curly hair slicked back into a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263652,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[1591,102235,102237,102236,102233,102239,28924,102240,102241,9,11,10,49,51,50,102234,102238],"class_list":["post-263651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-actors-and-actresses","tag-armisen","tag-choudhury","tag-fred","tag-jagannathan","tag-kaling","tag-manhattan-nyc","tag-mindy","tag-never-have-i-ever-tv-program","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-new-york-state","tag-new-york-state-headlines","tag-new-york-state-news","tag-poorna","tag-sarita"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263651"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263651\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}