LIFESTYLE INTERVIEW: ALICE AMTER
Can Versatile Actress "Bang" All Theories of Typecasting?
It was an audition room full of beautiful women sitting on a casting couch. Certainly, this is a normal scene in Hollywood. Many a movie critic would dig deep into his or her repertoire of adjectives in finding the phrase “casting couch-find” to describe a beautiful leading lady no one has ever heard of before.
‘Bollocks to the casting couch-find,’ Alice Amter probably said when she walked into the audition room for CBS’s hit comedy The Big Bang Theory. After all, this was no ordinary casting couch or waiting room. Sure, there were beautiful women, including Amter, but they were all dressed up in saris, the traditional Indian garb for women. While most were trying out for the role of young girlfriend to one of the show’s comedic players, a few were also auditioning to play the mother Rajesh Koothrappali, the show’s twenty-something particle astrophysics genius who is unable to speak to women face-to-face.
When Amter walked into the audition room, she vividly remembers her competition unable to determine whether she was trying out for the mother or girlfriend role. Of course, with her British background giving her unique insight of Indian culture, it was almost natural for her to land the role of Mrs. Koothrappali.
“There was the girlfriend role (available), but I wanted the mom,” Amter said, as she comfortably sat across from this writer in a plush chair. “I kind of secretly wished for Mrs. Koothrappali, since she would return again and again and become a staple of the show.”
Oddly enough, it seemed as if Amter was returning again and again to audition for the part. She recalls first getting the go-ahead to try out for the part, then enduring two sets of auditions before learning from her manager the role was hers.
“I remember when I got the call — it was with casting I wasn’t familiar with,” she candidly told Buzzine. “I just remember saying to myself, ‘Show them your talent — they don’t know you. Just show them your talent.’ Often, with casting, they are not expecting very much from new people. They like to deal with people they are already familiar with.”
Show off her talent she did, as Amter recalled the looks of each of the faces of the casting crew, describing with acute detail to Buzzine the reactions each person had as she acted out the lines provided her at the audition.
“I made them laugh, which is what you are supposed to do, since this is a comedy,” Amter said with a bit of a chuckle. Yet, she also had good material to work with, adding: “The material spoke to me; I found the material very funny.”
While she plays the stereotypical Indian mother of a girl-shy scientific genius on a popular sitcom, the role of Mrs. Koothrappali is quite different from what she set out to do when she came to Hollywood to pursue her acting career. The stunningly gorgeous actress and one-time English teacher in Japan hoped to play in several dramatic roles, though she also had an attraction to playing certain villainous roles.
“I never thought I would do comedy,” Amter said with a bit of a serious tone in her voice. “I came here fully intending to do drama. And I did do drama. To sort of become semi-famous from this really is kind of funny and weird, but good!”
While there is definitely a high degree of goodness in playing an Indian mother on a hilarious primetime comedy on CBS, Amter is maintaining a watchful eye on certain projects typecasting her into a similar role on future projects –- especially after she was cast on A&E’s popular new drama, The Cleaner. On that dramatic series, she also plays an Indian mother, albeit in a much more serious and heavier role. Even though she is starting to find the perfect balance between dramatic and comedic roles, she definitely wants to steer clear of being typecast as a mother for every project she works on.
“I’m definitely a person that is very character- and role-driven,” the British-born actor emphatically said. “My whole M.O. with this is being the chameleon — the shape-shifter. I don’t want to get locked in to doing one thing, and I know Hollywood is very fond of doing that. When you play an Indian mom right next to another Indian mom, you start to wonder whether I’ll just be the Indian mom now. So I’m a little concerned… But my other work pops up (such as A Man Apart), where I played a Latin-American assassin and I did all my dialogue in Spanish.”
Indeed, it was her roles such as the Latin-American assassin in A Man Apart as well as the way she portrayed an Indian mother in The Cleaner which give her hope to a diverse set of roles offered in the future. Amter was quick to point out her role in The Cleaner was quite difficult. For starters, she had to speak Hindi, a language she had never uttered before, though she is fluent in French, German, Spanish and Japanese and is able to imitate just about any well-known accent. Adding to the difficulty of her role was the submissive nature of the character, which was hard for Amter to pull off, considering her energetic persona.
“That was really a stretch for me because that character was just completely submissive and under the thumb of her controlling husband,” she humbly said. “The director kept telling me he did not want to see any form of assertiveness. It was hard for me to do.”
As hard as it was for Amter to pull off her role for The Cleaner, it was not that hard for her to decide to leave a well-to-do profession in Japan for the brighter lights of Hollywood. The former English teacher always knew she wanted to be an actress –- it was just a matter of when she pressed the button.
“I was living in Japan, teaching English, and had a very nice lifestyle with plenty of money,” Amter told Buzzine. “I just felt creatively stifled and it was a childhood dream of mine to be an actress, be an entertainer, be a performer. Because I was academically very sound and I had this particular talent for picking up languages, I was pushed in that direction.”
Yet, when the contract with her Japanese employers was up for renewal, she had an epiphany and finally decided to push her career in the direction it was destined to go in. Amter decided the time was right not to renew the contract and instead pursue her acting ambitions.
“I was kind of like, ‘Hmm, what should I do? I think I want to act.’”
And there she was, launching her acting career in 1998 as the first Indian doctor on the critically-acclaimed NBC drama, ER. Since, her name has been accredited in a total of 24 television shows or movies, including three episodes of The Big Bang Theory, an upcoming episode of The Cleaner, as well as key roles on an episode of Judging Amy and the Vin Diesel flick, A Man Apart.
Already quite the diverse resumé, Amter hopes to continue building upon her experiences in playing roles that challenge both her and her fans.
“For me, it’s always interesting to play the human condition, and it’s not always beautiful,” Amter humbly told Buzzine on a beautiful Friday afternoon. “To play the whole spectrum is sort of my goal. A lot of different things interest me — it’s roles, it’s the script… Now I just want to work with quality. I feel as if I kind of know how to do it all and kind of passed the infant phase.”
Amter has definitely exited the infancy stage of acting is and now ready for Hollywood. It is only a matter of time before she is landing roles to fulfill her dreams while also positively affecting the lives of others.
