in the DRIVER’S SEAT
Nanjiani makes sharp turn to comedy with ‘Stuber’
“Stuber,” Friday’s odd couple collision comedy, is a title that springs from Stu, the Uber driver being mocked by his won’t-goaway, temporarily blinded client, a cop.
Kumail Nanjiani (“The Big Sick,” “Silicon Valley”) is Stu, with a newly leased electric car. His nightmare client is Dave Bautista’s Vic, a crazed — or just crazy — LAPD cop desperate to find a dope-smuggling, martial arts master and killer.
For Nanjiani, the head-butting “Stuber” buddy humor couldn’t be more different than the Oscarnominated (Original Screenplay) “Big Sick” he wrote with his wife, Emily V. Gordon.
“I don’t see them as being completely different,” Nanjiani, 41, insisted. “That said, after ‘Big Sick,’ suddenly people were sending me scripts and I was getting opportunities I would not have gotten a year ago.
“I was a little bit scared and overwhelmed, so I sort of had a little bit of paralysis.”
That ended once he realized “the next thing I do should be very different. That’s why I chose ‘Stuber.’ ”
As the behemoth cop orders Stu to keep driving, the outrageousness — bodies, wrecked cars, a traumatized pitbull — never ceases.
For Nanjiani, a philosophy major at his Iowa college, the ride began before filming, as he reworked Stu.
“I try and personalize it. I put it in my contract (that he can edit or rewrite his lines), so the character can sound more like me.
“I’ve been acting long enough that I have an understanding of what’s funny for me — and I try to put pieces of myself into everything I do.”
If Vic most closely resembles an angry King Kong in human form, Nanjiani’s Stu is a bundle of exploding neuroses. He’s too concerned with his Uber ratings, romantically frustrated and being driven nuts by the maniacally determined Vic.
“For me, the funny-ness of the character comes last. When I’m thinking about how to make somebody,” Nanjiani said, “the jokes are easier if I can figure out who he is, what he likes, what his problems are.
“Stu is basically a people-pleaser. He doesn’t live for himself, he lives for others. He has a lot of anger inside that he has not allowed himself to express.
“That was the combination! A guy who bends over backward for other people, doesn’t fight for himself and has unexpressed anger. That’s where I started with Stu.”