Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh Still Can’t Believe ‘Deli Boys’ Exists

On June 4, the IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best television series. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the creators, artisans, and performers behind shows well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.

When actor Saagar Shaikh first heard about “Deli Boys,” he was represented by an agency that would consistently send him auditions for ill-fitting roles like “a 45-year-old father of three with an accent” (he’s in his late thirties and doesn’t have an accent). The actor — best known at the time for a supporting role in the Disney+ show “Ms. Marvel” — instantly loved the script, a gritty but comedic crime series about a pair of pampered Pakistani-American heirs to a deli conglomerate who discover, after their father’s death, that their money largely came from a secret drug empire operating behind the scenes.

Leaving his agency a few weeks later, Shaikh signed with Gersh, where he brought up the show to his agent, who represented creator Abdullah Saeed. She got him a meeting, and the two became fast friends. Shaikh initially auditioned for Mir, the hardworking, more responsible brother, with Saeed himself slated to play the partyboy pothead brother, Raj.

Eventually, he got a call that they went with a different actor for Mir, but two hours later, received a different call informing him that Saeed would no longer play Raj and asking him to audition for the role. He auditioned, and a few weeks later was doing a chemistry test with the new actor playing Mir, Asif Ali — a standup comic who was also at the time best known for a small supporting role in a Marvel show (in his case, “Wandavision.”) On the day of chemistry reads, Ali was in Chicago, and after his flight was delayed, he found a quiet hallway and, via Zoom, read with a handful of prospective Rajs, including Shaikh.

“I read with Saagar, and in my head, ultimately I have no choice over who gets picked, but I was like, this feels like a fun vibe, you know?,” Ali told IndieWire. “This feels like a good hang, we can bounce off of each other really well, which again, it’s like almost like speed dating, a chemistry test, and to do it on Zoom, we were working on hard difficulty.”

As Mir and Raj, Ali and Shaikh are the beating comedic heart of “Deli Boys,” a sharp, bloody, and very funny series that mines tons of culturally specific humor from its characters Pakistani backgrounds without ever reducing them to said backgrounds. Following Season 1’s release last year, Season 2 arrived on Hulu May 28, and on June 4, Ali and Shaikh will accept the Breakthrough Award at this season’s TV-centric IndieWire Honors. It’s an honor that feels all too fitting for both performers who, prior to “Deli Boys,” were used to not being the stars of the show.

Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh in ‘Deli Boys’Elizabeth Sisson/Disney

“I feel like we as a community have been beat down so hard by rejection,” Shaikh told IndieWire. “For a lot of people that we meet in the industry, we go to a lot of events now that we wouldn’t have otherwise gotten invited to, but this feels like their normal, and me and Asif, we’ll look at each other, and we feel like we were not supposed to get this far as, as a people. We’re living our bonus life. We’re so used to rejection or being co-stars or guest stars or in commercials. Being able to do this as our our real life full time job, and we get to go to events where people that we have seen on TV for years are going, and we get to just go and rub shoulders with them? We’re just trying to make the most of it.”

“The real breakout is steady employment,” Ali added.

The rare Hollywood production with a majority South Asian cast, “Deli Boys” shows the community not as common stereotypes or bit characters — “doctors,” “lawyers,” or “engineers,” as Shaikh puts it — but as complex and flawed people. The main characters, sheltered scions to a powerful CEO, feel a bit like the Roy siblings from “Succession” dropped into “The Sopranos.” South Asian culture is woven in naturally throughout the show: across the first season, the series finds humor in wedding customs, Indian/Pakistani relations, the characters’ Muslim religious background, and their transactions with mobs that range from Italian to Vietnamese.

For both Ali and Shaikh, the specificity of the show’s writing for its South Asian characters was exactly what drew their eye when they first read the pilot; as Shaikh puts it, it’s rare for him to see a work with more than one South Asian character he’s capable of relating to. While the show gets its humor from their culture, it also never portrays the community as a monolith, but as a group of people containing all extremes.

“As a performer, you want to be operating in an extreme anyway, because it’s a comedy drama, 30 minutes, like let’s go! We’re in crazy town, let’s go crazy, and that specificity is what makes the show that much more interesting. Getting the specificity of all these people, especially in comedy, allows you to satirize in a better way,” Ali said. “And it feels good as performers to be on something, and especially since our show is such a collaborative environment to be on a show and to be making something that you know you would be like, ‘Man, even if I wasn’t involved with this at all. I would be such a fan, and I’d be so excited about the swing.”

‘Deli Boys’Disney

While Shaikh and Ali are the definite leads, equally important to the success of “Deli Boys” is its wide ensemble, including many South Asian actors familiar to audiences, such as Brian George, who plays British mob member Ahmad, or Iqbal Theba, who plays the boys’ late Baba. Chief among them is Poorna Jagannathan, who serves effectively as the third central focus of the show as Mir and Raj’s loving but ruthless Auntie Lucky, the right-hand woman who takes over the business after their father’s death. Both actors are effusive in their praise for their co-star: Shaikh refers to her as “legend” and “Mother with a capital ‘M,'” while Ali describes her as a performer who helps them raise the bar for their own work.

“Just watching her was a master class in, ‘Hey, man, I know you think you’re being detailed, but there’s really a whole other level of depth you can get to that then makes everything so much better,'” Ali said. “For me, coming from an almost strictly comedy background, to be able to watch somebody like Poorna, much less perform with her, was such an amazing thing, and I think it grounds the show in such a beautiful way. She’s so professional, so talented, she just has it. Whatever it is, she has it.”

“She checks in on us, and is like, ‘Are you guys feeling OK?,'” Shaikh said. “She is just the type of human that if you’re feeling sick, she’s gonna bring you some soup, and to be that human being and be able to play a character like Lucky that can go in both directions, to be able to play that compassion and that sternness? That’s range.”

Ali described it as a blessing that the duo has been able to work alongside seasoned pros in the South Asian community and receive their mentorship and stewardship. As for the response he’s seen from South Asian fans of the show, he noted that they often admit to approaching the show with trepidation, fearing it will disappoint them. That the show hasn’t been a disappointment but a great success gives him hope that it can inspire future shows that further explores the complexity of the community.

“That’s how you know you’re doing something that’s interesting, because a lot of times people come up and be like, ‘Hey, man, I was really worried, because we’ve been let down before’,” Ali said.

“It definitely reiterates to me that we have to be excellent, we have to be undeniable to get recognized,” Shaikh said. “We don’t have the luxury of mediocrity. We have to work twice as hard to get half as far as most people in the industry, and, we’ve been up to the challenge, and so far we’ve been doing it well, and I hope to continue doing this for another 10 years.”

“Deli Boys” Season 2 is now streaming on Hulu.