Women are often startled when actor Kunal Nayyar speaks to them very unabashedly and without the slightest inhibition. “But you don’t talk to women” they say in a surprised tone.

“My standard answer is that I’m drunk,” guffaws Nayyar, 34, who has shot to fame playing an Indian astrophysicist Rajesh Koothrappali in the mega-hit US sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. In the series, Koothrappali suffers from an extremely rare disease called selective mutism which renders him mute whenever he meets women. Koothrappali’s mutism- affected tongue only loosens after he knocks back a few drinks.

But then, being identified with his ultra-quirky character is something that happens to Nayyar all the time. “I’m an astrophysicist in the programme so people ask me if I’ve read the latest paper on the Hubble Space Telescope,” says Nayyar, adding: “They forget that there’s a Kunal which is the reality of the human being and there is Raj which is the fictional Kunal.”

He might look like the unassuming and very nice boy next door, but Nayyar is now possibly the biggest Indian in the US entertainment firmament. He’s one of the top paid characters in The Big Bang Theory, which is reckoned to be the hottest sitcom of the last few years with a peak viewership of 20 million. Nayyar raked in a colossal $20 million last season according to Forbes magazine, the world’s wealth bible. That’s about $800,000 an episode.

The show went on air in 2007 and has already been on for a marathon nine seasons. And Nayyar has come a long way from the actor who was overwhelmed that he was being paid for what he loved to do. He’s also US TV’s third highest paid actor earning behind Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki, his co-stars on the show, according to Forbes.

And Nayyar’s moving from strength to strength. One sign that he had arrived on the US TV scene came when he was invited to be the guest host for three episodes of the iconic The Late Late Show.

The Big Bang Theory keeps him very busy for many months each year, but he’s furiously juggling a handful of other projects. He loves doing voice-overs and was the voice of Gupta (a Bengali badger) in the animated comedy Ice Age: Continental Drift. More recently, he played Vijay, the father of one of the main characters in Sanjay and Craig, a show on Nickelodeon.

In the near future, there’s also an upcoming voice-over project with DreamWorks Animation. “Voice-overs are a dream. You don’t wear make-up and sit behind the booth and make as much noise as you want to. As a theatre actor it gives you a lot of freedom as you can physicalise all of your voices as you really have to animate them,” he says.

He’s also making it on the big screen, albeit in non-mainstream productions like Dr. Cabbie — co-produced by actor Salman Khan — a story about a doctor who emigrates to Canada but is forced to become a taxi driver to make ends meet. One of the co-stars in the movie is Isabel Kaif, Katrina’s younger sister. He was also recently shooting A Momentary Lapse of Reason, about a millionaire who lives in the US. “The movie’s on hold right now. It’s an Indian movie in English,” he says.

Closer home, he was the producer of the 2013 cricket-based documentary film, Beyond All Boundaries by Sushrut Jain which was shown at the Mumbai Film Festival. And he’s also looking at other projects but says: “There are lots of plans but not enough financing. There’s nothing concrete.” Incidentally, though Nayyar lives full-time in Los Angeles, he’s still an avid cricket fan.

And while many Bollywood stars are looking for a big break abroad, Nayyar is moving in reverse gear and hoping to make a splash in the Indian film industry. “It’s becoming imperative for me to do a movie in Hindi. That will be my next big step,” he says.

“I would do a Bollywood mainstream movie but then I don’t have the body yet,” he laughs.

In between all this, Nayyar has found time to write a book, Yes, My Accent is Real: And Some Other Things I Haven’t Told You — which he refuses to call an autobiography — about his unexpected and meteoric rise to stardom and the pitfalls he faced along the way. Talking about how he juggles his time, he says: “I wrote the book. Then did a play off Broadway and then finished nine seasons of The Big Bang Theory.”

The idea of writing a book came to him soon after The Big Bang Theory became a huge hit and he began getting invitations to appear on mega-talk shows like Ellen: The Ellen DeGeneres Show and Conan. “I began to realise that this was a pretty cool story that a kid from Delhi made it to the world’s number 1 sitcom,” says Nayyar, who took two years to write the book. “I wanted to inspire kids to believe that they could do anything. That’s where this came from. I wanted Indian kids to just follow their dreams,” he adds.

Being an Indian at heart is, in fact, a big theme for Nayyar. He constantly reiterates that though he has made it to a stratospheric level in the US, he’s still very much an Indian and a Delhi boy at heart. He says very firmly: “I grew up
in Delhi and even now I see myself as a Delhi boy who works in the US.”

And he told one British publication: “When the plane lands and the steward says, ‘Welcome to Indira Gandhi International Airport, the current temperature outside is 45 degrees’ That’s when I feel most at home.”

In real life, of course, Nayyar is very different from the comically tongue-tied Koothrappalli. And, if proof of his ability to speak to women is needed, it’s there right by his side in the towering form of his wife, Neha Kapur, who was Miss India Universe 2006. It was love at first sight for Nayyar who says his first thought when he saw her was, “Wow, she’s hot.”

The instant attraction resulted in a six-day, big fat Indian wedding with 1,000 guests in December 2011 that was covered in People magazine. Nayyar feels that marriage has made him grounded. “You’re not just responsible for yourself but also your family. It ages you and matures you,” he adds.

Nayyar’s wedding was splashed across the celebrity pages but he’s extremely protective about his family. At a recent press meet his father sat through interviews, but when asked insisted that his son didn’t want him to talk to the press.

The fact is that Nayyar has zoomed to the top in a relatively short time. He studied at St Columba’s School in Delhi (he was born in London, but is at pains to reiterate that he isn’t a British Indian as some publications have made him out to be) and then moved to do business studies at the University of Portland, Oregon, in 1999.

It was there, as an antidote to loneliness that he made a foray into theatre (he jokes that it was mainly to meet girls). Soon he was juggling two course loads, taking marketing classes all day and theatre at night.

By the time he finished the course at Portland it was clear to him that he wanted to get into the entertainment
industry. So, he changed tracks and signed up for a Master of Fine Arts course at Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This highly exclusive school only accepts eight students once every three years.

Still, he didn’t have high hopes when he went to audition for The Big Bang Theory. His agent called one day and said there was an audition the next Monday for a Chuck Lorre show (Lorre’s a writer, director, producer, composer, and production manager and one of the biggest names in US television, with shows like Grace Under Fire, Cybill, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, and Mom, to his credit). Nayyar figured he would try his luck but didn’t have high expectations.

The Big Bang Theory has been a gigantic learning experience for Nayyar and has also involved a huge amount of hard work. To play Koothrappali, Nayyar had to research on what it means for a person to be pathologically shy. “I had to do a lot of substitution on what it would make me feel. I looked at myself in the mirror and tried to create two physicalities — when there was a woman in the room and when there wasn’t,” he says.

And there was more that he had to work on. “I came from the theatre background where you played things a lot larger as the audience is 15ft or 30ft or 40ft back. So I physicalised all emotions. TV on the other hand is just a small box in front of you. So you have to play down everything,” says Nayyar, who is visiting India on a trip which combines work with pleasure. It was not till around Season 4 that he feels he got it right.

Does Nayyar fear that he might be stereotyped? “I think that happens everywhere — even in Bollywood movies. Julia Roberts is a beautiful and she probably feels stereotyped that she always plays a beautiful woman,” he says.

The young actor’s also very particular about camera angles. “Double chins are a typically Indian problem,” he says with a laugh. But, if that’s really a problem, it’s one that hasn’t stopped him from climbing to the very top and staying there very firmly.