“So, I wanted [Mohan] to not look like she had her shit together. I had no makeup on, my hair was unwashed and awful, I was wearing mismatched clothes… That made my audition stand out, because I understood what they were trying to go for. Like, this isn’t Grey’s or any of the other shows… We’re not here to look pretty. We’re here to show what doctors are kind of going through.”
“There have been so many times I’ve seen myself on TV and been like ‘I don’t think I look like that. This is one of the first times where I’m lit correctly to actually show what my skin tone and my face look like. Our cinematographer Jojo [Johanna Coelho] did this incredible thing—she made sure the white on the walls was a specific kind of white that wouldn’t wash the darker skin tones out. She would swatch it and take photographs of people in front of it to make sure that it looked right.”
“I know l’ve lost roles in the past because they had another South Asian person on the show, and it always just makes you feel in a weird way like you’re competing with other South Asian people. But I don’t want to feel that way. I don’t want to feel like there’s one seat at the table and we’re all fighting for it. And also, who’s setting the fucking table? You know what I mean? Who decides that there’s one seat?”
It’s always been a deconstruction of a hero. It’s always been: Let’s build a hero that seems incredibly capable, incredibly knowledgeable, trustworthy, dependable, responsible, and then chip away at him. And so in the moment when you expect him to come riding in on the white horse, the horse comes in without its rider.
