It isn’t easy to push for your story to be told—or told right—explains Soni, recounting his experience playing Pavitr Prabhakar (the Indian Spiderman in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse). “The writers Phil [Lord] and Chris [Miller] are amazing, but they were so focused on Pavitr’s visuals that the character didn’t end up having much of a personality. I was too scared to say anything about it.” Luckily, someone else did. “Some animators on the movie were Indian and they set up a call with the writers to say: ‘We’re disappointed. We expected this character to be more.’”
The writers, remarkably, had no ego about it. “They said, ‘It’ll cost money, but let’s do it over.’ Hasan [Minhaj], me and a few other brown writers did a mini writers’ room. They showed us the character sequences, which never happens when you do voiceovers, and the character was better for it.”
Finding that bridge between cultures has been a big part of Soni’s life as well as this film. “Honestly, Roshan and I just wanted to make a Bollywood film in Hollywood,” he laughs. “Hollywood people love to say, ‘I want to watch Bollywood’ but they get bored or don’t understand it. Someone asked me, ‘Is RRR a gay movie? Because the two men hold hands in that song,’ and I said, ‘No, that’s friendship!’”