Hasan Minhaj's honest 2019 remarks about being an actor of color go viral

Comedian Hasan Minhaj is making waves after a Vanity Fair lie detector stunt he participated in 2019 resurfaced and went viral when a fan account shared it to Twitter.

The video – in which had Minhaj was hooked to a lie detector and asked a series a potentially embarrassing questions – shows him talking about how male actors of color have to continuously fight to receive the same opportunities as the “schlubby [white] dudes” he went to high school with.

The former Patriot Act host was specifically asked if he was hurt that Dax Shepard, a white comedian, called him a “nine out of 10”, and whether he thought he was better looking than Shepard.

What followed was an honest diatribe about the pressures men of color are forced to navigate when it comes to fame and success. “Dax is part of a thing where, in show business, there’s this whole movement of ‘approachable white dudes’,” Minhaj expressed before visibly hesitating a beat. “Whereas with men of color it’s like Idris Elba, Henry Golding, Zayn Malik – or you work in IT. There’s no middle.”

After the video went viral yesterday, Minhaj joked that he had googled Shepherd shirtless since and was given pause for thought.

If you are unsure whether Minhaj is right, consider that actor Kevin James continues to get paid millions for panned films such as Grown Ups 2 and Paul Blart: Mall Cop, while Minhaj’s own Peabody and Emmy-winning Netflix show was cancelled after only two years.

Minhaj argued that, too often, actors of color are expected to have unrealistic Avengers-esque physiques to achieve household-name status. He pointed to Idris Elba, Daniel Dae Kim and Zayn Malik as examples of this trend – stars who all, indeed, have abdominal v-lines that scream $500-an-hour training sessions and nutritionist-crafted protein shakes.

“You gotta have the v-taper in your abs if you’re gonna be Asian,” Minhaj, whose Muslim parents immigrated from India to the US before his birth, said. “You have to be Daniel-Dae-Kim ripped. You can’t ever have bread or cereal.”

Minhaj later ended his critique with this painfully honest admittance: “Do I think I look better than Dax? Yes. But I will not get the same opportunities that Dax does.”

While Minhaj’s words might initially appear to be another famous person complaining that he’s not more famous, they actually touch on the pressure a lot of people of color feel: they have to be as twice as good as their white counterparts in order to receive even half of the same successes.

It is easy to see these unspoken beauty rules in action. The American Pakistani comedian Kumail Nanjiani became the internet’s “zaddy” of the week earlier this year, after he revealed the buff physique he had put on for an upcoming Marvel film. Nanjiani revealed the internal reasoning behind enduring electric shocks and other “body-hacking” methods to Men’s Health: “I’m playing the first South Asian superhero in a Marvel movie. I don’t want to be the schlubby brown guy – I want to look like someone who can hang with Thor and Captain America.”

The demands, and inequalities, are notably tough for actors of color. Even for the successful “household” names Minhaj mentioned. Actor Kim made headlines when he, along with Grace Park, an actor of Korean descent, exited the successful CBS series Hawaii Five-O when reports broke that the two were making 10% to 15% less than their white co-stars. The problem is industry wide. A 2016 Writers Guild study found that, on average, white male writers earned a median income of $133,500 while writers of color earned an average of $100,649.

Online, social media users of color responded to Minhaj’s viral clip with their own honest narratives. One wrote, “Even in Internet culture it is considered attractive for a white man to be unkept and have sloppy looks, that’s a luxury not often afforded to people of color …”

While another responded to the video with: “Funny, I’m always justifying the fact that ‘I’m Latino but I don’t look like Ricky Martin or Enrique Iglesias, sorry’. There aren’t other archetypes. If a POC man wants a shot in entertainment he MUST be a 12/10, otherwise there are no opportunities, visibility or representation.”

With his honesty, Minhaj is opening up new opportunities for himself sans washboard abs and bulging biceps: the comedian is set to star in the next season of Apple TV drama The Morning Show, and recently released a shoe collaboration with Cole Haan. Maybe there is a “middle” after all.