Yahoo News Count Abdulla star talks bringing sitcom's Muslim vampire to TV
If you picture your routine vampire – whether its Edward Cullen, Spike or Dracula himself – it tends to be a tall white guy with fangs. But in Count Abdulla, the ITV comedy presents a British Muslim twentysomething as the latest addition to the undead and brings with it plenty of subversive criticism about the white-centric nature of horror.
The six-part sitcom, which is now available to stream on ITVX, follows the titular Abdulla as he tries to balance life as a junior doctor in London with the push and pull of his mother (Nina Wadia) and their Islamic community, as well as his secular friends.
That is, until he's bitten by the part-time dominatrix, part-time vamp Kathy (Jaime Winstone), clad in enough vinyl latex gear to district from her extra long canines.
Arian Nik, who plays Abdulla, says he instantly knew he wanted to be involved in the "absolutely mental" show, feeling an immediate connection to his character's position as an outsider looking in at two worlds of opposite extremes, unsure of where he fits.
"You reach a really interesting crossroads, which I got to last year, where I was like, either I continue to fulfil expectations from the community or I serve me and what's important to me," Nik says.
"That scary crossroads moment happens for Abdulla in the show. We've all had different versions of it in life and if we haven't, hopefully Abdulla's story will be good blueprint."
Nik then smiles and adds: "It sounds mental when I'm saying all this because he's got fangs and there's blood everywhere." He's not wrong – the show is a comedy, but accompanies its jokes with the jolts of any horror fare.
After a fateful bus-stop confrontation with Winstone's halal-hunting vampire, Abdulla becomes a jonesing vampire on the prowl for a quart of the red stuff, even if it is just from a bag of blood in the Hounslow hospital where he works.
Nik explains how Count Abdulla launched him down a horror rabbit hole, providing a welcome reason for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch, while filling his bookshelves with bloodsucker folklore as he established the differences in his own tastes in the genre – Jordan Peele, Babak Anvari – and that of Abdulla – Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee.
But Count Abdulla wasn't just about riffing on the classic staples, instead looking to put a Muslim twist on vampire conventions and come up with its own mythology, including a gaggle of old-guard hellions with their own demonic rules that Abdulla is deemed to have fallen foul of.
Within minutes of the first episode, the show is laying out its underlying project with a hospital cafeteria conversation between Abdulla and his friends, which puts horror tropes like Black characters dying first in the spotlight.
"Monsters don’t like people of colour," Amrita (Manpreet Bambra) tells him. "If immortal creatures of the night were on our side, do you really think there’d be racism, colonialism, sexism?"
In rehearsals for the show, Nik describes how the show's director Asim Abbasi told the cast that the show hinged on reflection.
"Vampires don't have a reflection and often as Brown creatives, we don't really see ourselves reflected in the media that we see," he explains. "That's literally what this show is.
"Count Abdulla feels like it breaks down so many of those stereotypes that we understand about the Muslim community, but also about brown people on screen. It really flips the script."
Praising Kaamil Shah's writing for the show, he adds: "It hits you with like a very classic sitcom joke or setup and then all of a sudden it's undercut with Abdulla realising all vampires were white before and now he's 'dirtied' the bloodline."
While shows that focus on the British Muslim experience shouldn't have to be rooted in politics, Nik noted, issues like Islamophobia are touched on because comedy can be "the best tool to disarm an audience".
He says: "As soon as you can make people laugh, they're suddenly open to exploring so many different schools of thought, and so many different perspectives."
Nik singles out the final sequence of Count Abdulla as one of his favourites, when Abdulla finds "answers" in what is, in some ways, a coming-of-age journey. "The end of the series feels like he finds a little bit of peace – before it all goes mental again," says Nik.
"Where we reach at the end of series one is a massive cultural and political cliffhanger," he then laughs, adding: "I was going to say hangover. That's not halal."
Count Abdulla is available to stream on ITVX.
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