You saw his moves and heard his beats as Donald in Pitch Perfect . Now Utkarsh Ambudkar has rapped his way onto The Mindy Project .
He's not yet a household name, but Utkarsh Ambudkar is starting to get recognized: the 29-year-old actor-musician was one of Pitch Perfect's breakout stars. Next up he's playing Mindy's rapper brother on The Mindy Project — the role, he explains, he was born to play. I spoke to Ambudkar about the Pitch Perfect experience, his music, and the struggles of being a South Asian actor in Hollywood.
Source: youtube.com
LP: 2012 was obviously a big year for you. What was life like before Pitch Perfect?
UA: So, I moved to New York — I attended NYU, did a BFA in Acting at NYU. I was really into hip-hop, so I started battling, like 8 Mile. I used to rap battle. So I decided I’m gonna be a rapper, I’m not gonna act, fuck acting, this is stupid. But I enrolled in a class where I was meeting agents every week.
[I got signed] and I booked my first Broadway show, which was a hip-hop play — it was a comedy. And I thought to myself, this is it. I got it. I’m getting paid $700 a week from nowhere. I’m big time. You know, I was just waiting in a Korean restaurant two months before this, so I must be doing something right.
Then I started VJ-ing for MTV Desi, which was an Indian-South Asian DIRECTV-only channel. So I’d go and I’d talk to these incredibly famous Indian performers and just shoot the shit with them basically. In the same time, I was doing off-Broadway plays and I booked a commercial. This was when I got a Radio Shack commercial, and I was like, I made it, dawg. And then I was also in a hip-hop group because I was pursuing music, and that group was called the Beatards.
So it’s an ongoing story. At no point in this story is there one big moment that makes it happen. It just so happened that my agent called and said, “There’s this movie Pitch Perfect. Here are the sides.” I think I originally read for Bumper, because Donald didn’t have much in the script, so I read all Bumper’s lines. I beatboxed for them, because that’s what my character was supposed to do. And then I was like, “By the way, I rap.”
