Taking on a killer role

After six years on 'ER', British actor Parminder Nagra is moving into sinister territory in a modern-day version of the Jacobean tragedy 'The Changeling'. It's a role even nastier than that of her co-star Ray Winstone, she tells JOHN PATTERSON.

PARMINDER Nagra is eating her full-monty American diner-style breakfast with the enthusiasm of the several-months pregnant. It’s a chilly morning in Los Angeles (it’ll be 27 degrees by lunchtime, though) and she is wrapped up warm, exhibiting little of the blazing-eyed defiance and vulnerability that is her staple as an actor. She is excellent company, with a healthy loud laugh, warming to such topics as exile, the US versus the UK, and the changing fortunes of artists of Indian, Anglo-Indian and south Asian descent in the 21st century.

This spring, Nagra completes her six-year stint as trainee doctor Neela Rasgotra on ER, as the US drama, for 15 years the mainstay of NBC’s Thursday-night schedule, bows out.

Now 33, Nagra joined the cast when she was just 26, the unknown star of the surprise smash Bend It Like Beckham. Much to her bemusement, her role in the girls-and-goals movie led to Fifa declaring her footballing personality of the year. The Leicester-born actor was a near total newcomer to LA and the US then; now she's a fully fledged local girl, with two dogs, a new house in the hills above Los Feliz and a list of good local Indian restaurants on the fridge. She and her photographer husband also have a baby on the way.

“I’ve had such a blast,” she says of her ER character, who’s lost one husband to a roadside bomb in Iraq and a lover to a double amputation for which she was made to feel responsible. “I’ve been on it for about the same time as you might spend at college, six years – a large amount of time. About a month ago, I started to get quite emotional about it all coming to an end.”

One thing she didn't really notice about her role when she started was how quietly groundbreaking it was for Indian actors in the US. "I didn't think much of it at the time, until I read articles people were writing: 'First mainstream Indian character on American network TV!' That's thrilling in itself, because the only other one at that time was Apu on The Simpsons, and I always had problems with his accent." Try being part-Scottish in America, I say, and living through Groundskeeper Willie's horrible accent.

"That's the thing with The Simpsons," she says. "You end up imitating the accent, even though you know it's wrong. That's how good that show is! Luckily for me, I was allowed to keep my own accent on ER, which was great, considering I was already going to have to learn these reams of medical terminology – it's almost like learning Shakespearean language."

Being Asian in the US is not quite the same as in the UK. There’s no post-imperial umbilical connection, no established Asian political infrastructure, and relatively few Asian elected officials. Even the word has a different meaning: “Here it means, like, Chinese or Japanese. When I say I’m Asian, they go, ‘Oh, you mean south Asian.’ So I now know to say I’m south Asian. It’s more specific but in a way, I like that more. And then the word Indian has a whole other set of complex historical meanings. I hate those forms you get at the doctors: ‘What’s your ethnicity? Indian subcontinent?’ I have no idea how to answer this question.”

This complexity was folded into her ER character right from the off. “They asked me, ‘What, traditionally, would happen in this situation?’ I said I’d just like to let this character play out without all that; try to see what any young twentysomething girl moving somewhere new is going to feel like. Of course, I have my heritage. It’s not like I don’t want to talk about it; it’s such a part of me. But it’s not two different identities, it’s one and the same.

“Ever since then, the storylines I’ve had have usually been about the cases, not about – oh my God! – her traditional family background. I feel, even more so than the shows I did in England, that we’ve really nailed it: me being allowed to play a character for six seasons and not being stuck in this kind of political arena. Plus, they love all those English swearwords like ‘bollocks’ and ‘wanker’.”

There are other differences between working in the US and the UK: “In England, it feels like there’s a lot more material to be had. In terms of the British-Asian experience, we kept seeing things about arranged marriages, mixed-race relationships, with things imploding then ending well. There were more British Indians getting into it recently – writing their own work and getting it made – instead of other people writing what they thought those experiences were. America still has some catching up to do in that regard.”

One of the pleasures of working on ER, she says, has been its ensemble feel, the fact that cast and crew could move up through the ranks. “It’s one of those rare places where they’re very nurturing. Somebody who started as an assistant finally got his first episode made, which he wrote. That’s amazing. I don’t know how quickly that would happen in England: there’s always some stumbling block, there are fewer people deciding your fate, or whether something’s any good. Here, the industry is a lot bigger and richer. There are more companies to go to, more decision-makers, more networks to approach.”

Last year, Nagra returned home and took on a somewhat different role in an ITV drama called Compulsion. A modern-day rendering of Thomas Middleton's Jacobean tragedy The Changelingset among the British-Indian bourgeoisie, Compulsionwaill be broadcast in May. Nagra has the prime role as the stone-hearted daughter of a successful businessman, who uses the family chauffeur/henchman, played by Ray Winstone, to get rid of the bore she's arranged to be married to. She then finds she quite likes being evil, and is more than slightly turned on by this brute she's always despised. There is a lot of sex.

“When the script turned up, there was a lot of very heightened sexuality in it, and the arranged marriage thing again. But knowing Ray was in it, I thought, ‘I can’t just get stuck on that’. As I read further, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is an awful person!’ I kept reading, looking for some redeeming feature. Most characters I get, there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, but with this one there was nothing. I started to like it for that reason.”

And working with Ray Winstone? “Now there’s someone who sticks with his accent – even when he’s playing Henry VIII!” How about all those sex scenes? “We couldn’t stop laughing. We mainly talked about food – ‘I wonder if it’s shepherd’s pie for lunch today?’ – even in the middle of these sizzling clinches. You really mark it out, then say, ‘Tell me when you’re running and we’ll just go for it.’ It’s very awkward at the best of times, but Ray’s great with women. He has to be. He’s surrounded by women at home: wife, three daughters – no peace.”

We finish by talking about Obama's presidency ("best soap opera ever") and Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake, about Bengali immigrants in New York, which was made into a movie by Mira Nair in 2006.

“That film is so right about what it’s like being an immigrant, constantly adapting all the time, parent or child. You end up respecting the parents for what they went through and what they sacrificed. They came from India to make a new life. I can relate to that in that I made a move over here. But I had a great job and I speak the language. And I wouldn’t have had that if my mum hadn’t moved to England.” Guardian service