Doug D'Mello (Russell Peters) and Priya Sehgal (Mishqah Parthiephal) in The Indian Detective. Photo copyright of Netflix.
If you work for a living, you know that some days are better than others when it comes to earning your paycheck. Unfortunately for Constable Fourth Class Doug D’Mello, he has more bad days then good ones. Having sworn an oath to uphold law and order, he does his best to help keep the peace in the city of Toronto, but he always seems to be swimming upstream when trying to do his job. Easy-going, dedicated and hard-working, Doug wants most of all to be promoted to detective. If only he could stop getting in his own way, and, in turn, gain the respect of his fellow constables as well as superior officers. The odds, however, might finally be shifting in his favor as Netflix’s new dramedy The Indian Detective unfolds. Hugely popular Peabody and Gemini-Award-winning stand-up comedian Russell Peters plays Doug, and just like crafting the perfectly-timed joke, it took a while before this particular project came to fruition.
“Funnily enough, this project was first brought to me five years ago, and subsequently again and again under various guises,” says Peters. “Each time it would be a new incarnation, and the people in charge would ask me, ‘Alright, are you in?’ and I’d tell them, ‘Yes, I’m in.’ Six months later they’d come back to me and say, ‘The guys you met with before are out, but we’re still going forward with the project, only now we’re thinking of doing this.’ It just kept changing and changing until it got to where it’s at now. Even the title, The Indian Detective, was only a working title because we couldn’t think of anything else to call the show, but then that title just stuck.
“So it was always going to be my project, and I think they kind of wrote around my strengths so to speak. The thing is, Frank Spotnitz [series co-creator/ executive producer], is such an amazing dramatic writer, and when he asked me, ‘What jokes should I write?’ I said, ‘Frank, don’t write any jokes. It’s not your forte. You just write the best story possible, then I’ll read it in my voice, and it’ll work.’”
In the show’s opening episode, Doug is suspended for one month from the police force due to incompetence. While on leave, he receives a call from his father Stanley (Anupam Kher) in Mumbai, India, who tricks his son into visiting him. Despite not having the closest of relationships with his father, he reluctantly returns home. While in Mumbai, a request from a beautiful young woman, Priya Sehgal (Mishqah Parthiephal), leads Doug to investigate a murder involving the city’s most notorious gangster, Gopal Chandekar (Hamza Haq). Although he feels like a fish out of water, the change of scenery coupled with being so far away from his “loser” reputation back in Toronto, allows Doug to discover his true inner detective. In doing so, however, the constable puts himself as well as those closest to him directly in the line of fire.
“Doug is sort of like me, but there are parts of him that are nothing at all like me,” explains Peters. “For example, I don’t share his disdain for India. I actually love going to India and always enjoy being there. There’s also Doug’s disconnection with Indian culture, which is not the same as me, Russell. Again, I feel a little bit more connected than he does to the culture. As far as Doug and Stanley, my character should probably be closer than he is to his father, but he harbors a lot of resentment towards him because his dad was an airline pilot and away from home a great deal when Doug was growing up. However, throughout the four episodes, he learns there’s more to it than just his father not being around.
“In the beginning, Doug appears to be an idiot who doesn’t really know much about police work at all. As the story goes on, though, you realize that he is actually pretty good at his job, and while it seems like Doug shoots from the heart, he’s actually onto something.”
Were there any particular acting challenges that Peters found initially stepping into the role? “The only real challenge I had was my weight. I didn’t realize how heavy I’d gotten until I’d seen how heavy I’d gotten,” he jokes. “I thought, ‘Wow, I don’t know what the heck I did wrong,’ but after all was said and done, I went to the doctor’s about two months ago and found out I have an underactive thyroid. That’s why I’d gained so much weight. So I was good to know it was a health issue as opposed to me just eating too much.”
One of Doug’s few supporters back in Toronto is his partner and best friend, Constable Robyn Gerner (Christina Cole), to whom he is romantically attracted. Sadly, those feelings are not reciprocated by her, and it does not help that Robyn is involved with another officer. Then, of course, when Doug becomes enamored of Priya, it further complicates matters, or does it? “My character feels like he’s torn between two lovers, but he’s with neither of them, so he really has no reason to feel torn,” says Peters. “When you’re watching the show, you might think, ‘Oh wow, she’s playing him,’ but neither of them are. Doug has no actual ‘claim’ to Robyn or Priya, but you get sucked into it with his way of thinking.”
Along with watching Doug’s interaction with the two women currently in his life, albeit not quite in the way he would like, audiences will enjoy seeing him cross swords with Marlowe, a morally questionable billionaire property developer played by none other than Star Trek’s one and only William Shatner a.k.a. Captain James T. Kirk.
“It was pretty cool to work with someone like William Shatner,” enthuses Peters. “The first day we shot a scene together, I couldn’t help but geek out on the inside. After all, I was standing there with William Shatner, and what’s neat is that he’s not just Captain Kirk. He’s played so many other characters throughout his decades and decades of work on TV as well as in films. He’s very iconic, and when he began talking, I got caught up listening to his voice. All I could think was, ‘Oh, my God, I can’t believe it. I’m standing across from T.J. Hooker,” notes the actor/comedian with a chuckle.
Recently named by Rolling Stone Magazine as one of the “50 Best Stand-Up Comics Of All Time,” Peters, a Toronto native, began performing onstage in 1989 at the age of 19. He has entertained audiences around the world at such venues as Madison Square Garden, The O2 Arena and The Sydney Opera House, with his most recent tour, the Almost Famous World Tour, taking him to over 120 cities and across 25 countries. On the small screen, Peters’ comedy act has been seen in specials for Showtime, Comedy Central, Netflix and Canada’s CTV Network. A familiar face to moviegoers, his feature film credits include Chef, Source Code, Breakaway and The Jungle Book along with the upcoming movies The Clapper, Supercon and Public Schooled, which had its premiere at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival.
“I never really said it out loud when I was a kid, but I always wanted to be in film and/or TV,” admits Peters, “so it’s been like a lifelong dream for something like this to happen. Of course, because the likelihood of it coming to fruition is so slim, you sometimes don’t want to say it out loud for fear of people wanting you to fail. One of the reasons I got into comedy is because very early on someone told me I wasn’t good-looking enough to be an actor. I thought, ‘Wow, that’s pretty mean, and honest,’ and then I figured, well, I’m going to need something else to offer them, so I went with comedy.
“There are people in this business who are good writers and not good performers, and others who are great performers, but not that great at writing. I think the trick is to straddle the line between the two. I don’t consider myself the most prolific writer, although I do write a new act every couple of years. So after eight or nine specials, I guess there is a certain level of prolificness to that. The biggest challenge when writing is that you’re always trying to think of ways of doing something differently. Every time I start to write a new act, I ask myself, ‘Should I write it in this style or that style and go a different way?' However, when you step back onstage, your fans don’t want to hear you change. They want to hear what they want to hear. They want to hear new versions of your style, and if you watch any comic, they all have their lane, and everyone stays in their lane. If, for example, Bill Maher started talking about camping instead of political stuff, people would think, ‘What’s he talking about.’ It would be the same thing if Jim Gaffigan, who likes to talk about food, suddenly switched to talking about race relations. So as much as a comic wants to try doing other stuff, there’s always a danger of losing his or her core audience.”
If the opportunity arises, would Peters be interested in reprising his role of Doug D’Mello in new installments of The Indian Detective? ‘Absolutely,” he says, “and I hope it comes to pass, but at the end of the day it’s not up to me. That’s why I love doing standup, because standup is always up to me,” teases Peters.
Steve Eramo
As noted above, photo copyright of Netflix, so please no unauthorized copying or duplicating of any kind. Thanks! The Indian Detective is currently available on Netflix (U.S. & International). Russell Peters kicks off his Deported World Tour in Australia on Monday, February 5th, 2018. Details here — http://www.russellpeters.com/
