Hasan Minhaj

In It Ends with Us (2024) he plays Marshall, husband to Jenny Slate's Allysa, and Slate gets the laughs. Minhaj stands beside her, is given little and does it amiably, and that is the shape of his film work so far: the friend, the husband, the pleasant man at the side of the picture. In No Hard Feelings (2023) and TRON: Ares (2025) he passes through without our reviews pausing on him, which for a supporting player is not a crime, but is not a recommendation either.

The reputation was made elsewhere. He began doing stand-up around 2008, was a correspondent on The Daily Show from 2014 to 2018, and became known for Homecoming King (2017), a special about growing up Indian-American, and then for Patriot Act (2018–2020), which mixed stand-up with the week's news. The method there was his own: screens behind him, a Steadicam following him about the stage, and a habit of addressing the audience directly, as though he had cornered you at a party and was not going to let you go. Film acting followed from 2017 and thickened between 2023 and 2025 into a run of supporting parts, Babes (2024) among them.

The difference between the two careers is who wrote the words. He has described his stand-up as "seventy per cent emotional truth—this happened—and then thirty per cent hyperbole, exaggeration, fiction", and he has been accused of leaning harder on the thirty than that suggests. Whatever one makes of that, the stories are his and he tells them his way, and in other people's films he has neither the story nor the way. We spent It Ends with Us waiting for the script to hand him a scene, and it never did, and we minded more than the size of the part warranted, because the man who fronted Patriot Act plainly had more to say than Marshall.

Best of the Best (2026) is the first time a film has let him write. He and Prashanth Venkataramanujam, his writing partner across two films, built a college comedy around a Bollywood dance team and the two young women who run it, and the script is quick, funny and likeable, though it cuts its dances into confetti and forgives its young men far more readily than its young women. Minhaj gives himself a supporting turn and plays it with the ease of a man who wrote his own lines. It is the best film he has been in and the one in which he looks most at home, and the two facts are related.

On this evidence the thing to watch for is not the next part he is offered but the next script he and Venkataramanujam finish. Until then, in other people's films, he is good company and not much more, and directors who hire him for the husband should not be surprised when that is what they get.