Malik Elassal on his FX comedy ‘Adults’, stand-up, and Adam Sandler’s status as the GOAT: “One of the funniest things I’ve ever read”
As anyone who has watched the FX comedy Adults will know, one of the most laugh-out-loud moments of the first season involves a Zoom job interview. The audience watches in mounting disbelief as the hapless Samir Rahman unexpectedly aces the interview and is given the job on the spot. He’s not quite sure how to react, but when the smiling faces from the nameless Fintech company encourage him to celebrate his success, he begins dancing awkwardly.
As Samir gets increasingly into his dance, though, and receives more and more encouragement from his new employers, the viewers know something disastrous is about to occur; they’re just not sure what it will be. Then Samir drops his trousers, turns around, and moons the Zoom meeting. The employers’ mortified faces as they witness his butt cheeks gyrating back and forth tell the story more than words ever could, and when Samir turns around and pulls his trousers up, he knows he’s not going to be a Fintech guy after all.
All this is to say, when I sat down to interview Malik Elassal, the rising Canadian stand-up star and actor who plays Samir in Adults, I had one burning question that begged to be asked first. “Have you ever had a Zoom interview mishap quite like Samir, where you completely misread the room like that?” I enquired with a smile, to which a mischievous Elassal raised his eyebrow and quipped, “I mean, we just started this interview…”
However, as a testament to how thoroughly Elassal understands Samir and empathises with his plight as a Gen Z guy trying desperately to get by in a modern world that mostly seems aggravated by him, he noted that the mooning incident isn’t just a silly joke. The fact that Samir didn’t do it by accident but instead got “hyped up and that’s what came out”, speaks perfectly to his character.
“He thought that’s what they wanted,” Elassal chuckled, “‘They want me to show my butt’. He’s just a people pleaser”.
Elassal’s lead role in Adults, which debuted on May 28th to stellar reviews and a feverish internet reaction, is the culmination of the last several years of the 29-year-old’s life. In 2022, he was named one of the ‘New Faces of Comedy’ at the Just for Laughs festival in Montreal, and two years later, he appeared on Vulture’s list of ‘Comedians You Should and Will Know’. He has been performing stand-up ever since graduating from the Calgary Islamic School in his hometown, and he still loves the instant gratification of making audiences laugh. “Stand-up is always, always going on,” he emphatically notes. “It’s never a thing I’m trying to get out of. It’s always, sort of, the main vein”.
When it comes to stand-up, the comedian/actor is adamant that anything is fair game to be made fun of. Half the electricity of performing onstage is seeing how he can dance through the raindrops with jokes about Islamophobia mixed in with less incendiary material like living with his parents or going to therapy. His background growing up in a Muslim household in Calgary means his perspective is fairly unique among modern comedians. However, he does push back slightly on how much it actually defines his act.
“I can’t really speak to that,” he mused, “I just know I like to talk about where I come from and how I grew up. I just want to bring people into my world, even if I’m not specifically talking about my background or whatever. If people understand something about me, then they understand my perspective on a number of specific things.”
While he loves the instant feedback of being on stage, Elassal also always wanted to pursue acting. Between 2020 and 2022, he landed a few minor roles in the television shows Fortunate Son, Joe Pickett, and Resident Alien, but when he read the Adults pilot script by The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon scribes Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, he knew it was a cut above everything else he’d been auditioning for.
“I was like, ‘This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read’,” he recalled about first laying eyes on that script. “You get so many auditions that you kind of get to the point where you’re like, ‘Are these things even happening?’ I don’t even know if these are projects that will exist. I’m just doing these auditions and throwing them into the abyss. But then this one: I did it, and it was really funny.”
At this point, Elassal had become so accustomed to most of his auditions going nowhere, or the shows themselves failing to make it to air, that he assumed Adults would similarly find its way into a black hole. Only when he received a call back did he begin to hope this might be the audition that would finally pay off for him. “It was hard not to get attached and get ahead of myself and hope,” he admitted.
Now, years later, with a wildly popular first season in the can, he can’t help casting his mind back to reading that screenplay and how it made him feel. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, man, this is the funniest script ever’,” he reiterated, “‘It would be so fun to be able to do something like this’. So, you know, thank God!”
Over the course of filming the first season, Elassal revealed how close he began to feel to his fictional counterpart, who is five years younger than he is in real life. Samir is a 24-year-old living with his four best friends in his childhood home in Queens, New York, and together, they go through the hilarious, heartbreaking, absurd, and highly modern trials and tribulations of 20-somethings today. Despite much of the show revelling in Samir’s very many faux pas, it never seems to be making fun of him, and the affection he and his pals Billie, Issa, Anton, and the amusingly full-titled Paul Baker have for each other feels genuine and authentic.
Indeed, it’s often said that sitcoms live and die on the chemistry of their casts, and if that’s true, then Adults should enjoy a very long, healthy life. “We were so obsessed with each other,” Elassal revealed about working with Lucy Freyer, Amita Rao, Owen Thiele, and Jack Innanen in the chaotic yet heartfelt show. “Right from the jump, everybody brought their own thing to it. It’s really cool. We all come from different worlds: comedy, acting, and performance. So, it’s like we all brought a little different thing to it, and we all genuinely really liked each other.”
Creators Kroenengold and Shaw worked closely with Big Mouth’s Nick Kroll on the show, and they encouraged the cast to hang out with each other in the weeks leading up to shooting the pilot. The idea was to see if a true bond began to form that could be built upon while filming the show, and it’s safe to say the mission was accomplished.
“When you don’t have that much time, you’ve kind of got to tell each other everything about yourselves,” the actor explained with a thoughtful nod. “You’ve got to be open to make up for that lost time. Everybody would come to my room, and we’d order room service and just tell each other everything.”
Forming such a quick yet enduring bond with his co-stars meant every day on set was fun, and Elassal wound up feeling “very envious” of his character. “Just for the time of his life that he’s in,” he wistfully admitted. “I mean, even though I’m doing exactly what I want to do right now, I look back at that time in my life and think, ‘That was the best time when I was just hanging out with friends, and nobody had anything figured out, and we were all probably terrified and stressed out’.”
While Elassal admitted a certain amount of “rose-coloured glasses” probably applies here, he argued that most people have the same nostalgic sense for their misspent youth. “I kind of see a younger version of myself, who is a little more chaotic but having a great time,” he nodded, before chuckling. “Everything I look back on in retrospect is good, even if it was a horrible thing. I look back at it fondly, even if it was bad!”
Overall, he believes audiences of varying ages have connected to Adults because it’s a good hang, it’s damn funny, and the cast have genuine fondness for each other. However, he thinks the show speaks to Gen Z on a deeper level because Kronengold and Shaw have injected as much reality into it as possible, while still ensuring it doesn’t terrify an entire generation about what they can expect in the big, bad world or become a parody of itself.
“I think my generation is really feeling that we were sold, ‘You’ve got to go to college, you’ve got to do all this stuff to prepare yourself’,” Elassal argued, “Then you get out there, and the world is not what they told you it would be. You can’t buy a house or do any of this stuff. It’s just a lot harder than people said it was going to be. And the people who were already doing it feel like it’s easy. So, they’re annoyed at you.”
As for the future, Elassal is hopeful that he hasn’t seen the last of Samir Rahman and that Adults will continue for many more seasons. “I know we have a lot of fun making it, so, selfishly, I hope we get to keep doing it for that,” he smiled, before adding, “But also, people really enjoy it, so it’d be nice to keep putting it out there.”
However, he also has a dream involving the man he considers the greatest big-screen comedy star of all time: Adam Sandler. “I was obsessed with all the Sandler movies growing up,” the young star gushed, becoming visibly excited while talking about his comedy hero. “Sandler’s a big one. Sandler is the guy. Just the way he was able to be completely silly and then completely heartbreaking and genuine. He has one of those faces where he can do anything. He’s the GOAT forever.”
Naturally, Elassal would love to be in a Sandler movie alongside his idol: “I would take anything,” he chuckled—but he admitted there’s a much more personal reason why the Happy Gilmore star connects with him so much. “He looks like my dad,” he laughed, “He has a similar look when he cries, and when he’s really genuine, I can see my dad’s face in his face”.
Then, with the same mischievous expression he gave at the beginning of the interview, he grinned, “Maybe I’ll play Sandler’s son at some point”.
