Poorna Jagannathan is not your average desi aunty. As Lucky Aunty in Hulu’s Deli Boys, she is not the woman stationed around the kitchen, issuing warnings, feeding everyone or holding the family together while the younger characters get the plot. She is a fur-coated operator inside a Pakistani-American cocaine business, which is exactly why Lucky works: she takes the authority desi aunties already have and moves it out of the home and into the underworld.
Created by Abdullah Saeed, the series follows two Pakistani-American brothers who discover that their dead father’s deli was, in fact, a front for a cocaine empire. What begins as a family-business crisis quickly becomes a crime comedy about inheritance, dirty money, community networks and men who are nowhere near as smart as they think they are. Season 2 is out today, and Poorna Jagannathan’s Lucky Aunty is not watching the chaos from the side. She is helping run it much like Helen McCrory’s Polly Gray in Peaky Blinders.The role was originally written for a man. But Saeed saw the vision after attending a talk by actor Geena Davis about turning male characters into women. Much like Lucky, the character, too, literally had to make space for itself in a male-dominated world. Lucky is not a respectable aunty upgraded with naughty one-liners. She is a South Asian crime boss in her 50s. When Vanity Fair called her a “cool auntie,” Jagannathan corrected it: “She’s not a cool auntie. She’s a murderous auntie.”
