After eight seasons playing nerdy Indian astrophysicist Raj on “The Big Bang Theory,” Kunal Nayyar — a self-proclaimed actual nerd from New Delhi — realized people really didn’t know anything about him beyond his popular character.
So he titled his new collection of humorous essays “Yes, My Accent Is Real: And Some Other Things I Haven’t Told You” (out this week) after a question he gets from fans.
“They think either I’m this American actor or they read an article that says I’m London-born, so they think I’m British,” Nayyar, 34, tells The Post. “A lot of people don’t know that I’m actually Indian, that I grew up in New Delhi … My entire family lives in India.”
The essays cover his childhood, his fish-out-of-water experiences at the University of Portland, Oregon, meeting his beauty-queen wife, Neha Kapur (Miss India 2006), and landing the “Big Bang” role after a failed attempt to launch his acting career as a leading man.
“I would always audition for the lead characters and I would never get them,” says Nayyar, who didn’t realize he was cut out for comedy until auditioning for “Big Bang.”
“When you’re a comedian, you want to be the leading man, and when you’re the leading man, you want to do comedy.”
When it comes to his “Big Bang” co-stars, Nayyar is tight-lipped (the cast has a strict privacy policy when it comes to what happens on set), but he does touch on their backstage antics in one essay.
“I talk about how we’re obsessed with playing pingpong, or we all have an affinity to eat 17,000 Altoids before a take, who cracks up the most — which is mainly me,” he says. “I break all the time.”