Nasim Pedrad Finally Has Her Dream Role on ‘Chad’—All She Had to Do Was Write it

As a first-time executive producer, Nasim Pedrad was regularly on the phone making decisions and adjusting schedules. For many of those calls, she was dressed as a 14-year-old boy. The “Saturday Night Live” alum tackles teenage angst and identity in the TBS series “Chad.” Premiering April 6, Pedrad serves as the comedy’s creator, writer, executive producer, and star, playing the show’s titular character, Chad, a Persian boy coming to grips with family life, heritage, and his place in the social hierarchy of high school. 

The show’s journey from conception to completion took many detours. Pedrad first sold the series to Fox in 2016, but never went to production; it wasn’t until 2019 that “Chad” was picked up by TBS. Five years since its initial iteration and one pandemic later, viewers will finally meet Pedrad’s socially awkward, endearingly unaware Chad. “I keep saying I feel like I’ve been pregnant for five years and I’m now delivering this baby,” Pedrad says.

Despite the challenges in finding the show a home, Pedrad’s faith in the character continually drove her to see the project to fruition. Though she’d never been a 14-year-old boy herself, Pedrad was able to imbue the character-driven story with elements of her own history. The show captures the awkwardness of adolescence, authentic to her experience growing up as a child of Iranian immigrants. “You’re caught between these two cultures,” she posits. “On one hand, you want to embrace your heritage but you’re at an age where you’re also completely mortified and trying to distance yourself from anything that feels like the otherness of being foreign. All you want to do is fit in.”

While Pedrad has previously had success in television and film, with roles on “Mulaney” and “New Girl,” and in 2019’s live-action “Aladdin,” Pedrad knew in order to portray the parts she really wanted, she’d have to write them herself. Prior to joining “SNL,” Pedrad penned a one-woman show, “Me, Myself, and Iran,” which she performed at Upright Citizens Brigade Theater. Writing, she figured, was the natural next step in her comedic training. 

“I was always excited to write because it made me feel a lot less stagnant as an actor,” she says. “I wasn’t waiting around for a job that, more often than not, I didn’t even want, to then audition with 300 other girls to book it.”

Now with experience on the other side of the table, Pedrad understands the ecosystem of a set. The insight she gleaned from working as an executive producer will inform her acting moving forward, she says, now that she’s privy to what goes on behind the scenes that actors typically aren’t attuned to.

Pedrad’s fingerprints are on every element of “Chad,” from the world-building to the casting, including slotting herself in the title role. (“You can also get away with more because funny moments can be funnier and less sad because you’re not sitting there laughing at an actual Iranian child,” she says.) 

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This personal investment in a project was a new phenomenon, since her work as an actor prior to this point has been largely supporting others’ visions. For creatives, it’s essential to play the long game, and to make the project you actually want to make. Hybrid actors, she insists, no longer need to rely on outside approval.

As a five-year waiting game finally comes to a close, Pedrad reflects on the path that led her here: finding her voice as a writer, a network search, embodying a young male character, completing shooting and editing during a pandemic. After all that, Chad still makes her laugh, and, most importantly, she gets to bring a new Middle Eastern family to television. “When I started out in my acting career, [and] certainly when I was growing up, I had never seen a half-hour comedy centered around a Middle Eastern family,” she says. “I was excited to create a Middle Eastern character that was written from an empathetic place and someone that was funny and nuanced and vulnerable and flawed even, but with flaws that were human and relatable.”