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I'm not even Indian-American: I'm Indian-Indian. Everybody expected me to have henna and a nose pin and talk in an accent like Apu from 'The Simpsons.' I was nervous because I wasn't sure if America was ready for a lead that looked like me.

It's hard to think of myself as an American, and yet I am not from India, a place where I was not born and where I have never lived.

Growing up in the States, there's this part of me that's like, man, I'm Indian. Like, this is where I belong. And as soon as I got to India, and I had to go to the bathroom in some places, I was, like, 'Man - I am American.'

Americans always ask how much I love my accent, and I don't get that - I think I sound like a school teacher.

I'm completely Americanized - I have an American accent, an American wife - but a residue of me is foreign.

The great thing about not being American is that you don't assume you know what a Southern accent sounds like, so you have to be specific.

When I lived in India, I'd speak like an Indian to get good prices while shopping. I'm good with accents.

I have spent too long training myself to speak with an American accent, it's ingrained. I spend 16 hours a day on set speaking with an American accent. Now, when I try to speak with an Aussie accent, I just sound like a caricature of myself.

I speak pretty fluent American, though I do so with a strong British accent, and I love America: The scale and the variety of it are astonishing to someone not born there, and I'm convinced that its energy and generosity have somehow rubbed off on me and affected my writing. For the better.