Kunal Nayyar

He signed up for a theater class at the University of Portland to impress a girl and left with a career instead. After she moved on, he stayed, eventually getting an MFA from Temple University and grinding through auditions in New York. The Big Bang Theory came in 2007, when he was 26, and Raj Koothrappali turned out to be the kind of character who could sustain twelve years of network television. Raj's inability to speak to women without alcohol sounds like a joke premise, but Nayyar played the loneliness underneath it straight, which is why it worked.

The Big Bang Theory ended in 2019 after 279 episodes, and he's been figuring out what comes next. A 2020 turn in the British crime drama Criminal: UK earned him a 2021 BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actor, which most people missed. Since then he's done guest spots, indie films like Spaceman, and romantic comedies. He's notably the only main TBBT cast member whose character wasn't paired off in the finale, and he's not rushing to fix that. The post-show existential crisis he's described publicly ("I had everything I ever wanted by 30 but I felt empty") turned out to be more honest than most celebrity midlife statements.

His name, Kunal, means "one who sees beauty in everything" in Sanskrit, taken from a Himalayan bird. There's also an asteroid (8627 Kunalnayyar) floating through space in his honor. His 2015 memoir, Yes, My Accent Is Real, is exactly what it sounds like: him getting ahead of the typecasting conversation before anyone else could frame it. He married former Miss India Neha Kapur in a six-day wedding in New Delhi with over a thousand guests. He anonymously donates to GoFundMe campaigns for medical bills, which he's called his "masked vigilante thing." Either very sweet or very on-brand for someone who played a character defined by what he couldn't say out loud.