'Midnight Mass' Actor Rahul Kohli Reflects on Representation, Cinematic Stereotypes, and What Inspired His Performance
There may have been other prolific filmmakers who have shaped the modern horror genre over the past decade, but Mike Flanagan has been hands down one of the most exciting voices to emerge from it in the same amount of time. From Absentia to Doctor Sleep, there isn’t a project of his that hasn’t been nightmare fuel. His latest project, the critically-acclaimed Netflix series ‘Midnight Mass’ is no different.
While it’s best to go into the series blindly, the basic premise follows the inhabitants of a small, isolated island who become increasingly divided after the simultaneous arrival of a disgraced young man and a mysteriously charismatic priest.
As Flanagan works wonders behind the camera, there is a slew of splendid talent working in front of it too. Aside from some of usual collaborators, such as Kate Siegel, Henry Thomas, and Annabeth Gish, actors Hamish Linklater, Samantha Sloyan, and Rahul Kohli also shine in this series.
Recently, the founder of FilmSpeak, Griffin Schiller was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to sit down with Kohli. Throughout their interview, one of the many things the English actor was happy to discuss was his love of video games.
“I was playing Red Dead Redemption again for the fourth time while I was character building,” Kohli says, but adds that the character is more than just the cowboy hero audiences are used to. “This character [embodies] two things... John Wayne, and in Post-9/11, you had America’s greatest villain; the bearded brown man who’s Muslim, and [Flanagan] fused them [together].” Flanagan and the actor worked together to create a great character who embodies some of the greatest aspects of American heroism, and yet is also a part of America’s sordid and racist history.
Elaborating on the idea of how his character is full of rich, refreshing, and often unaddressed commentary on a Muslim living in a post-9/11 world, Kohli emphasizes that everything the character stands for reminded him of what it was like for him to grow up at a time where there was a lot of Islamophobia directed towards any person with brown skin. “For something so rare, by a tiny, tiny, tiny amount of people from a very specific community group, 20 years later [it’s] still just as damaging to us as a whole.” Midnight Mass paints perhaps one of the most positive and heroic portraits of Islam in recent memory, shining a lot on the peaceful and loving set of beliefs so many choose to ignore. Kohli admits that even though he’s an atheist, he’s still ‘religion-adjacent’ and felt a great deal of responsibility in bringing Sheriff Hassan to life to honor, represent, and speak the truth of his family, friends (his best friend, in particular, served as a consultant on the show), and anyone affected by the unfair and unjust post-9/11 hate, This role and Kohli’s performance is for all the pain that his culture and anyone with brown skin has experienced over the last few decades.Taking on the additional homework of listening to Ennio Morricone’s scores and watching Deadwood episodes definitely helped Kohli to finely tune his character, but he also recounts that it cost him something he had always wanted to experience. In preparing for his character, Kohli isolated himself from everyone else. It makes sense because (without spoiling anything) he remains pretty distant for a majority of the series. However, he says while working on the entire series, his biggest regret is that, “I want to be a better actor, I want to grow and learn, and there was a master class of acting going on [there] for free. I had seats!”
“I was so afraid of this role, I almost felt like I couldn’t do it, so I shouldn’t do it to a certain degree. Now that I look back at the experience of who Sheriff Hassan is, the things that this man says, the thing that this man represents. That PTA meeting [in the show] isn’t just informative to the residents of Crockett Island, that’s informative to everyone that watches Netflix about their misconceptions about Islam and the Quran. Has that been said before in a show that’s going to be watched by this kind of audience? No. One of my main goals with this guy was media when I was younger. One of the first questions I asked my best friend, who is a Moroccan Muslim, served as a consultant on the show, I watched him suffer through Islamaphobia, was, when we were teenagers, all we got were terrorists, we were the bad guys - most of the actors who were portraying them weren’t even middle eastern - what did we want to see at that time? And the answer was, ‘I want to be the hero.’ Why can’t we be the hero, look good, look like a leading man, be a badass, be stoic, be sweet, be pure, protect people? That’s why I’m so proud of this guy. Mike really did something we rarely get to see on screen and I hope the community - not just Islam but in the broader sense, anyone who was ever affected by the stereotypes and gets roped into them - I hope they feel some level of ‘yeah, that’s the fucking guy, we got our Harrison Ford.’”
He jokes that he’s since made things right, and has grown closer to the cast and director Flanagan. Interestingly enough, he also mentions that he broke a personal rule for Flanagan. “I don’t watch my work,” Kohli revealed, “I wasn’t planning awning on watching Midnight Mass [either]...but I think it was June, I was with Mike and he was like, ‘You want to come around to mine and watch it?’ and I [didn’t] want to pass that up.” Since seeing it with Flanagan, Kohli also revealed that he’s watched it three more times. Despite calling the experience “painful” and “vulnerable,” he makes it clear that it was just as rewarding. Harkening back to the topic of video games though, Kohli claimed that not only did he use video games to prepare for his role as the gun-slinging Sheriff Hassan in the series, but he’s also been trying to get a prominent Japanese video game designer to check out the show too.
“Hideo Kojima has had a profound influence on me,” Kohli confessed, when asked about his attempt to get the Death Stranding creator to check out Midnight Mass a few weeks ago. “I know we got our Rotten Tomatoes fresh seal, and I know that you get all the [other] things, but I just want the Instagram post of Hideo with the Midnight Mass poster,” he says. He even joked that if Kojima ended up watching it, that would be a seal of approval in itself deeming the show a work of art.
Shortly after this conversation, Rahul received the blessing of all blessings in Kojima’s seal of approval.
Of all the things the show is and has to offer, what does Kohli want to be its biggest takeaway? The answer may surprise you. He simply states, “A lot of brown people have just been given a new cosplay character.” A simple statement, but a profound step forward for representation.
Midnight Mass is now available to stream on Netflix.
Listen to the full interview below:
Article write-up by Dempsey Pillot