Fresh from the hit romantic comedy The Big Sick, Variety is reporting that Kumail Nanjiani is set to co-write and star in a small screen adaptation of Stephen Frears’ 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrette.
The project will reunite Nanjiani with Alec Berg, executive producer on Silicon Valley, who will executive produce alongside Stephen Gaghan (Traffic) and Hanif Kureishi, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of the original movie.
My Beautiful Laundrette followed a young Pakistani man in London who rekindles a romantic relationship with his childhood friend, a former right-wing gang leader, and sets out to turn his uncle’s run-down laundrette into a profitable business.
Meanwhile, Nanjiani has also hinted to Variety that early discussions are underway about the prospect of a sequel to The Big Sick, the semi-autobiographical tale he penned wit his wife Emily V. Gordon:
“Yesterday, some of the people involved, I won’t say who, were saying, ‘You guys need to do something about this. That’s really the first serious conversations that anybody’s had with us. Sequels to comedies are tough. It’s tough because they repeat the formula and then it fails. So we’d have to have a different story – the same people, different story.”