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Kumail Nanjiani is starring in the series Welcome to Chippendales, as the founder of the first club to feature male strippers dancing for audiences of women. Nanjiani co-starred in the comedy series Silicon Valley, co-wrote and starred in the film The Big Sick, and was the first South Asian to play a Marvel superhero.
It sounds like something dreamed up by a team of romantic comedy writers: A Pakistani-American comic falls in love with an American graduate student, but because of cultural pressures from his family, he is forced to keep the relationship a secret. It is only when she becomes mysteriously ill and is put into a medically induced coma that he decides to tell his family about the woman he loves.
Born in Karachi, Pakistan, Nanjiani moved to the U.S. for college. "I have a very conflicted relationship to where I'm from ..." he says. "It's still a struggle to negotiate some of it."