Two Asian Americans star in action comedy 'Stuber'

Dave Bautista and Kumail Nanjiani are reluctant buddies in 'Stuber'

Two Asian American male leads. Two men who don't conform with the Asian male stereotype. Two brown Asians.

Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista star in the move Stuber, due out on July 12. Its a buddy movie, of sorts. Nanjiani plays the mild-mannered Uber driver named stu, who picks up a passenger, Bautista, who turns out to a cop hot on the trail of a brutal killer. Amid the harrowing ordeal, Stu desperately tries to hold onto his wits, his life and his five-star rating.

On the heels of a series of romantic comedies featuring Asian Americans in lead roles, The Sun is Also A Star, Always Be My Maybe and last August's Crazy Rich Asians and To All The Boys I've Ever Loved, it will be interesting to see if Asian American netizens rally around this action-comedy starring Filipino American Bautista and Pakistani American Nanjiani, who are a departure from the aforementioned films with predominantly East Asian stars. 

Based on the trailer, it doesn't appear that Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy) or Nanjiani (The Big Sick, Silicon Valley) play off their ethnicity but they also won't play the Asian male stereotype, the meek, sexless, powerless faceless characterization. They're just two polar-opposite characters in some wild situations.

Part of what made Nanjiani's The Big Sick, which he wrote with his wife Emily Gordon,  unique had to do with seeing a Pakistani immigrant like Nanjiani playing the lead in a romantic comedy. 

With Stuber, the flick features Nanjiani and Bautista, who is Filipino American, as the leads and also includes Indonesian action star Iko Uwais as its villain. And so suddenly, and rather quietly, here is a major studio summer comedy starring three men of South Asian descent.

“It's so exciting,”  Nanjiani tells the L.A. Times in an interview. “It's sort of the balance, right? This is not a movie that's like about diversity or anything in any way, but I think that's the victory, having movies that just happen to have diverse people and that's not what the movie's about. It's just a great movie that just happens to have South Asian people in the movie.”

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