Anoop Desai
Anoop Desai is an actor, born 1986.
Desai's acting career is a second act. He finished sixth on the eighth season of American Idol, wrote and performed music afterwards under the name TOTEM, and only from 2020 shifted the weight of his working life to acting. Sixth place on a singing competition is the sort of finish that usually closes a door rather than opening one.
The pivot has gone unusually well. He plays the Djinn across the fourth and fifth seasons of What We Do in the Shadows, a wish-granting demon inside a house of vampires, and the part is a precise piece of comic engineering: the Djinn has to be pathetic, bureaucratic and faintly menacing in the same breath, and the joke stops working the instant an actor plays it too broad.
Around that sits a spread of good rooms. He is Salim in Russian Doll, Robert in Babygirl, Raj Masihajjar in Under the Bridge, Josh in The Adults and Ravi in Little Voice. That is a list of shows and films with serious writers attached, which is a fair signal of how quickly he was taken seriously by people who had no reason to care about the singing.
Movies (2)
TV (4)
Where to start with Anoop Desai
Go to the later seasons of What We Do in the Shadows first. The Djinn arrives and immediately becomes one of the best recurring bits in a series already crowded with them, and you can drop in almost anywhere, since the show is close to episodic.
Russian Doll is the next stop and the better piece of television overall, though his part in it is small. Babygirl is the highest-profile film here, an office drama with real tension running through it. Under the Bridge is the heaviest, a true-crime limited series that treats its subject with care. The Adults is a quiet, prickly indie about siblings and card games, and Little Voice is the sweetest thing on the list by a distance.