Saagar Shaikh has so far played two brothers, one devout and one useless, and he is funnier as the useless one. He delivers a terrible idea in the voice of a man ordering lunch, and that calm is the whole act.
Fi1m perspective
In Deli Boys (2025), Raj Dar proposes something that will probably get everyone killed, and he proposes it the way other people propose a sandwich. Saagar Shaikh does not raise his voice, widen his eyes or let on that he knows the line is a joke. The plan is awful, the delivery is serene, and the laugh lives in the gap between them. He gets the better lines in the series because Raj is the only person in it who does not appear to want them.
The calm is a choice, and we know that because of what he did before. In Ms. Marvel (2022) he played Aamir Khan, Kamala's older brother, the pious and dependable son who had already done everything the parents hoped for. He brought Aamir back for The Marvels (2023), where the family arrives in the second half and is funnier than anything the plot is doing around them. Between the devout brother and the stoner is a complete reversal, and Shaikh manages it without changing much beyond his tempo. He came up through improv and sketch at UCB, and it shows in how loosely he holds a scene while everyone around him grips.
With Asif Ali as Mir he makes a proper double act. Ali plays the panic; Shaikh plays the absence of it. Their scenes alone together are the warmest thing in Abdullah Saeed's series, and the writers, knowing this, keep interrupting them with a gun. That is also where the limit lies. Ten episodes in we still barely know the brothers, which is the scripts' fault rather than the actors', but it means we have not yet seen whether Shaikh can hold a scene that is not built around a joke. We laughed at Raj more than at anyone except Poorna Jagannathan's Lucky, because Shaikh never once asks for the laugh, and the one thing we wanted and did not get was a scene where he had to stop being funny.
He grew up around a family convenience store, which may be why the deli looks like somewhere he has stood before rather than a set he has been shown round. That is a small thing, but small things are what he is good at: the unbothered shrug, the pause before the bad idea, the brother who has decided that everyone else's panic is not his problem. The part we would most like to see him offered is the one where nobody hands him the punchline.
Biography
Saagar Shaikh is an American actor. He is known for playing Aamir Khan in the Disney+ series Ms. Marvel (2022) and the film The Marvels (2023). He later starred as Raj Dar in the Hulu comedy series Deli Boys (2025–2026), for which he received the Breakthrough Actor Spotlight Award at the 2025 Astra TV Awards.
Shaikh was born on 29 November 1986 in Texas. He studied business at the University of Texas at San Antonio and trained in comedy at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre in New York, where he co-founded the South Asian troupe The Get Brown in 2018. He has also co-hosted the podcast The Bollywood Boys.
