“It’s so antithetical to the current political climate, which is all about exclusion and fear,” says A Nice Indian Boy director Roshan Sethi. With a 96% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 97% audience score, the rom-com has emerged as one of 2025’s most acclaimed films while also breaking new ground as one of the first mainstream Western movies to centre a gay South Asian love story.
Adapted from Madhuri Shekar’s stage play of the same name, the film follows Naveen (Karan Soni), an Indian-American doctor who introduces his white fiancé, Jay (Jonathan Groff), to his traditional family. At a time when LGBTQIA+ rights and immigrant communities are under relentless attack, the film’s warmth and optimism feels radical.
“It just shows that people want this kind of content and they crave this kind of sweet, aspirational love story that’s about the family as well,” continues Sethi. “It has almost seven million views for the trailer now, which is close to some studio films, which shows that this isn’t of obscure interest to people. There are a lot of people in America, even if they’re not the dominant political majority, who are looking for this kind of film.”
In conversation with GAY TIMES, Sethi and his real-life partner Soni discuss the historic release of A Nice Indian Boy and how it both subverts and pays homage to the rom-com genre. (If you don’t fancy a long read, stick around for the interview in video form.)
GT: A Nice Indian Boy feels like the freshest and most joyful rom-com I’ve watched in years. It’s been received so positively by such a wide range of people, not just those of the gay Asian experience. How does that feel?
Roshan: Great. We’ve been to theatres where it’s entirely white women watching the movie, having a great time. So it’s been nice to see that there’s such a range of responses, but I think in the end, specifics in good rom-coms always fall away, and people are just responding to the love.
Karan: Yeah, it’s healed all our trauma. Success heals everything. Sorry, therapy! I don’t need you anymore!
GT: The film boasts 98% on Rotten Tomatoes, which must be wonderful for you both considering the rather evil political climate we’re in?
Roshan: I was equally as pleased that our audience score was so high, which is at 97%. It just shows that people want this kind of content and they crave this kind of sweet, aspirational love story that’s about the family as well. It’s so antithetical to the current political climate, which is all about exclusion and fear. This movie is truly the exact tonal opposite of that. It has almost seven million views for the trailer now, which is close to some studio films, which shows that this isn’t of obscure interest to people. There are a lot of people in America, even if they’re not the dominant political majority, who are looking for this kind of film.
GT: The story of A Nice Indian Boy speaks to so many different layers: being queer, being South Asian, navigating tradition, desire and living authentically. It’s based on Madhuri Shekar’s play, but what aspects of your own experiences did you inject into the film?
Roshan: I’m a doctor, so we made the lead a doctor. That would probably be the biggest thing we did. Then, aspects of his personality became aspects of Karan’s character’s personality, in addition to aspects of our own love story, where Karan was initially much more expressive than I was in the beginning of his affection and love. And we kind of inverted that and had him play, in a weird way, me in the beginning of our love story. We added other small, more random bits like the wedding planner, who’s not in the play or the original draft of the screenplay. I’m not sure what he adds emotionally, but it just suddenly felt very disarming to us to have this kind of toxic wedding planner who’s saying all these mildly homophobic things but has a primary concern, which is money. It felt so disarming because it wasn’t about how difficult it is to plan a Hindu gay wedding, it was about how absurd it is.
Karan: Roshan is not credited as a writer on the movie, but he’s a very good writer. And Eric Randall, who did adapt Madhuri’s play, did a great job of making the movie not feel like a play and expanding the world of the play to make it feel like a whole world. When it comes to the practicality of making a movie of this budget, with the amount of time we had — we shot over 18 days — the original screenplay didn’t suffice with the budget. So Roshan did some really creative sort of restructuring and writing to make the movie makeable, but also more interesting. For example, the first date originally all played in one big scene — including the movie, the walk to the bar — and then he decided to split it up, with cutting back to myself and Peter’s characters discussing the date and breaking it up into those pieces, which then led to Peter and I improvising anytime we’d shot that stuff.
He’s very smart at being like, ‘What’s an unusual way? Instead of just watching a date play out from beginning to end, what’s a fun kind of way we can do that?’ And splitting those things up — Jonathan’s singing and all of that kind of stuff — is all kind of from Roshan. So it’s not exactly personal, but it’s more just his skills as a writer that he kind of took it into that direction. Because this genre, Roshan says it a lot, it’s a rom-com. It has to hit certain beats: there has to be a meet-cute, there has to be the first date, there has to be the couple breaking up. Roshan’s always thinking about, ‘How can we make that more interesting or different, or put a different spin on it that makes it feel original?’ Sometimes, I think the downside of the genre is that it can feel like you’ve seen a version of this before in other movies. You’re always trying to reinvent how you’re doing that, and he was very good at doing that.
GT: Like you said Karan, rom-coms do have certain tropes that we know and love. Since this is essentially the first gay South Asian film, did you feel a pull to subvert those tropes, or was the idea to embrace them, knowing that just showing that perspective alone already makes it feel new and fresh?
Roshan: Theoretically, we’re not the first gay South Asian film because there have been a few in India that have obliquely dealt with the issue. Some actually not even obliquely. But we’re certainly the first one, I think, made in the West. I feel you have to satisfy some of the tropes in order to make people feel the things they want to feel, because they have ultimately come there for love. And so, you have to deliver on that love. But, we resisted the clichés wherever we could. For example, there are actually two proposals in the movie. One of them is very atypical for a proposal. The last third of the movie is not actually about resolving the couple’s central conflict, which would be the structure of a typical rom-com, and more about reconciling the couple with Naveen’s family. So there are all kinds of things that are unusual and usual about it, but it’s always the mix, I find, of both.
And the thing you’re dealing with in rom-coms, which is the reason most critics usually don’t like rom-coms, is they do have to be sentimental to a degree because you’re talking about something as earnest as love. And what is sentimentality is actually all in your perception. Americans are very reserved, for example — and I think the British are too — and they don’t like overt emotion, even though they crave it. Whereas in an Indian movie, people are delivering weeping, blubbering speeches from frame one. There’s no restraint, and the concept of subtlety, if you can call it that, doesn’t exist maybe to the same extent there. So, it’s all sort of cultural. That’s one of the things that’s interesting about the reception to rom-coms — people bring with it their own biases. How open and naked should you be with your love? I added the line about being embarrassed by the bigness of love because I do feel that people are embarrassed by it, especially in the West, and maybe to a lesser degree in the East.
GT: It feels like Jonathan Groff’s character Jay is in a rom-com, whereas maybe Naveen isn’t. I love that contrast, especially the scene where Jay sings, because I think I’d have, erm, the same reaction…
Karan: That’s very much Roshan and I on our first date: me being the Jonathan Groff character and Roshan [my character]. I love rom-coms. I don’t think Roshan ever really watched one until we wrote 7 Days, our first movie, which was a rom-com in some ways. But, I love this genre. Roshan didn’t even really watch comedy that much before meeting me. He was more of a drama, biopic…
Roshan: Searing drama.
Karan: Searing drama, Oscar person. So I think working in this genre, in a way, is good [for him] because the basic cliché is not going to satisfy him enough. He needs it to feel a little bit beyond that. Whereas I think for a lot of rom-com lovers, even just the basic version makes you happy. But I think that’s a lot of us, we’re just switching the roles. I’m playing a version of him in that date.
GT: Roshan, are you now acquainted with the rom-com stylings of the Julia Roberts’ and the Katherine Heigl’s? Do you know them all now?
Roshan: Yeah, I’ve watched them all now. In the process of writing 7 Days, and the lead-up to it, I watched a lot of them. I was mostly not impressed. I really liked When Harry Met Sally. I thought that was a really good movie. A lot of them I find just truly insipid. It’s almost like they’re treated like frivolous entertainment, and so there’s some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where people make them frivolous. But my whole thing is: love is not frivolous. At least it wasn’t for me, I take it so seriously. Making it a comedy doesn’t mean you’re taking it less seriously — but making it a frivolous comedy does. So that was the kind of distinction that I was interested in. I wondered why they indulged to such a ridiculous degree in completely not realistic-feeling plots, because I think people would relate more to a rom-com that has plots that feel like they’re within you…
Karan: I don’t know, people chase people to the airport every day! In real life, people are stuck in traffic trying to stop someone from getting on a flight so they can tell them how much they love them. You see it all the time in the air!
Roshan: It’s so cringe. I would just never. If I saw that, I would literally cover my eyes. I would feel so embarrassed, like secondhand embarrassment.
Karan: There’s a Bollywood movie where the girl is about to get on the plane and they’re like, ‘We must stop her.’ But in this movie, the entire family runs through the airport and none of them have tickets. The grandma’s there too, and the grandma can’t run, so one of the family members is holding her up like a baby in his arms as they’re running through the airport. It’s the most iconic scene. And Roshan saw that and he was like, ‘This is just mortifying in every way.’
Roshan: Yeah, and what a problematic movie. They’re basically trying to convince her to move into their house, not work and abandon her career and aspirations to just belong to their family. It’s disguised as a cute moment. They’re running and like, ‘You must live with us!’ Then at the end it’s like a horror movie, she’s fully abandoned her career, is living with the man’s family and is like, “I’m so happy you came and got me at the airport.” Movies are so full of crazy tropes. They really are.
GT: You’re both making moves on your next films. Roshan, there’s something in the works with Ryan Reynolds’ production company?
Roshan: I’ve written a rom-com that Ryan Reynolds’ company, Maximum Effort, is producing, and we are out to cast and trying to get it made. But it looks like another movie of mine will go faster, which is an action movie.
GT: And Karan, you’re playing a serial killer in your next film?!
Karan: Correct. It’s like I’ve finally gotten the role that really speaks to who I am. And Hollywood is not easy, and I’ve had to stab some people in the back to get to this Zoom. People say A Nice Indian Boy is my personal life. Honestly, the serial killer is more of my true story of how I made it in America. So, I’m really excited for people to see deep into my soul. It’s called Fade to Black, and it should be out in the next year, I think.
GT: Well, I look forward to seeing your true serial killer personality emerge when we next chat.
Karan: Yeah and then we’ll do Jonathan Groff: the sequel. It’ll be like his Mindhunter character, and then my serial killer [character], and then they fall in love. That’s the GAY TIMES exclusive: this unwritten and unmade movie that’s going to combine these two random things together.
A Nice Indian Boy is out now.
You can watch our interview with Roshan Sethi and Karan Soni here or below.
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