Anjali Bhimani on D&D Live-Play Series Inspiration & More

Posted in: Dungeons & Dragons, Games, streaming, Tabletop, TV, Wizards of the Coast | Tagged: Anjali Bhimani, critical role, DesiQuest, dungeons & dragons, EffinFunny, interview, Jasmine Bhullar, Omar Najam, Rekha Shankar, Sandeep Parikh, Shadowrun: Excommunication

Anjali Bhimani (Ms. Marvel) spoke with us about her live-play adventure series DesiQuest, blending acting & roleplaying careers, and more.

With the popularity of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Game of Thrones, and Stranger Things, high fantasy has seemed to reach a golden age in pop culture reverence into mainstream acceptance as we discover a growing number of actors who embrace tabletop roleplaying, some even appearing the most popular franchises which include the likes of Kevin Smith, Vin Diesel, Todd Stashwick, Deborah Anne Woll, Felecia Day, and Joe Manganiello. One such actress who’s busted into the scene standing toe-to-toe with her contemporaries in the live-action and voiceover world is Anjali Bhimani, who not only has incredible acting chops, having honed her craft in the theatre while also thriving in some of the biggest IPs in the film, TV, and gaming realms. The Ms. Marvel star’s latest is a passion project called DesiQuest, an epic, culturally authentic Dungeons & Dragons actual-play show with an all-Desi cast, with the game mastered by Jasmine Bhullar that will Fire Bolt your brain and Thunderclap your heart. Bhimani spoke to Bleeding Cool about the inspiration behind the game, her lifelong passion for gaming, and how acting seemed like a natural fit as a career from her roleplaying. In the game, Bhimani plays the druid, Sitara.

What’s the inspiration behind DesiQuest?

Bhimani: It mainly came from Jasmine Bhullar, who is our Dungeon Master for the show and one of the executive producers. She had talked to me years ago. We did the ‘Doom Eternal’ one-shot for ‘Critical Role,’ and she told me back in March 2020, “I want to put together a show where there are people who look like you and me, from our background at the same table. The truth is – and this is coming from me more than and specifically that conversation – we’ve seen historically, ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ has been more of a Eurocentric and Medieval Europe setting with the occasional spin-off.

People from different cultures haven’t always been represented in the standard fare there, and what Jasmine wanted was to create a world in which we could invite people into South Asian and Indian culture but do it in a fantasy setting so that it would be inviting and that we could play with people with a common understanding and language, not the actual language, but the common lexicon of these life experiences, then invite other people in to play with us and to watch it together. That was my first introduction to the idea with Jasmine, and she’d had a conversation with a couple of other people, too.

A few years later, she hooked up with the fellows at EffinFunny with Sandeep Parikh and Anand Shah, hit them up, and they all teamed up to put that dream into motion. They tapped me, and I was already on board when Sandeep called. I was like, “Yeah, we talked about this years ago; of course, I’m in!” That grabbed Omar Najam and Rekha Shankar, both from D20 and CollegeHumor (now Dropout). They ran a Kickstarter earlier this year, and it was successful. We filmed, launched it, and here we are.

What’s your background in tabletop gaming? Did you grow up on it, or was it something you recently fell into?

I started playing ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ when I was eight years old; when my brother brought me the basic ‘D&D’ set as a gift, I played and fell in love with it. It’s funny because I was talking with my mom about this yesterday. We played a lot when we were kids, all through high school, and then also started dabbling a little bit in the video game world, the ‘Forgotten Realms’ video game stuff at the time, the original ‘Baldur’s Gate,’ ‘Neverwinter Nights,’ and all of that. Because of time constraints and not necessarily having people around me who shared that common interest, there was a long period that I call “The Dark Days of Gaming” in my life where I didn’t play as much, but I got to come back to the tabletop world.

When I met Matt Mercer and Marisha Ray back in 2016, we talked a little bit about our shared love of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ and TTRPGs in general. A year or so later, Marisha introduced me to Ivan Van Norman over at ‘Geek and Sundry’ where he was doing a new show called ‘We’re Alive: Frontier,’ where we would be playing the ‘Outbreak Undead’ game system, and the world would be based on the ‘We’re Alive: Frontier’ podcast. That was my first introduction to TTRPG live-play shows, but it was certainly not like, as I said, “Playing since I was a kid. I understood the assignment,” shall we say. Ever since I got in, there’s been no looking back. I have been well immersed in getting to play all kinds of RPGs and love it. Since then, I’ve worked at ‘Critical Role’ a few times. I’ve also worked with ‘Dimension 20,’ just finished the ‘Shadowrun: Excommunication’ series with RealmSmith Studios and Catalyst Game Labs. Now, here comes DesiQuest.

When it comes to your acting career and your roleplaying, did you find the latter making it easier for you to decide on a career performing?

It did transition to my acting career – absolutely, 100 percent an easy decision. I loved doing it when I was a kid and through junior high and high school. It wasn’t until high school that I figured out that you could do it for a living as a viable career. Once I told my parents this is what I want to do, they were supportive. They immediately bought season tickets to the Ahmanson [Theatre] here in Los Angeles, so I could see all the plays that were there, then I went to Northwestern University for my theater degree, and then I graduated seeing a ton of theater and started treating it.

I treated it like you would in any other serious career with a work ethic. My parents were super supportive because they understood that I wasn’t just making a slight decision. This was something that I cared about, and even though they’re both surgeons, they’re both tremendous proponents of the arts. They met doing a play together when they were much younger. It was something that I was lucky to have such an easy decision for me with love and support from my family.

Effinfunny’s DesiQuest first episode is now available. For more information, you can check out the series here.

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