Rahul Kohli is the quiet outsider in Mike Flanagan's horror series, watching people he does not trust and being courteous about it. He does his best work listening, and the shows have not yet asked him to do much else.
Fi1m perspective
Watch him in Midnight Mass (2021) when somebody else is talking, which on that island is most of the time. Sheriff Hassan, the newcomer who does not share the parish's faith, does most of his work with a face that has learned to expect the worst and be polite about it. We kept watching him in scenes that were not his, because that face told us more about the town than several of the sermons did, and the series has a great many sermons. It is a supporting part played as though the whole story were happening to him, which, quietly, it is.
The career started small, with UK television parts in EastEnders and Holby City and a short-film debut in 2007. The turn came with iZombie (2015–2019), where he played Dr Ravi Chakrabarti, a comic medical examiner, in all 71 episodes, and became a familiar face on American television. From 2020 he joined Mike Flanagan's company for a run of horror series: Owen Sharma in The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), Hassan in Midnight Mass, and Napoleon Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher (2023). Between them he took a lead in Next Exit (2022), a road-trip drama with a supernatural streak, outside the Flanagan circle.
What he brings to the ensemble is warmth without softness. In Usher he and Kate Siegel get the sharpest lines, and he can throw one away and make it land harder for the carelessness. He prepares heavily, with accent work and physical change and research into the faith or culture of the man he is playing, and the effort does not show on screen, which is the point of effort. Of Flanagan he has said: "To be honest, the material's fantastic, but I don't really care about the material, I care about the man." That loyalty has served him well and it has also kept him in the same sort of part.
Because the reservation, so far, is not about the acting. It is that the roles have been outsiders and supporting figures in genre television, in series we scored 72 and 65, where the writing is talkative and the best acting is done by the people made to sit still and hear it. Kohli is good at sitting still. He was funnier in iZombie than anything Flanagan has let him be, and Next Exit suggests he can carry a film. The next interesting thing would be a lead that asks him to stop being polite.
Biography
Rahul Kohli is a British actor born in London on 13 November 1985. He trained with the Questors Theatre company and made early television appearances in British series including EastEnders (2013) and Holby City (2012).
Kohli gained prominence as Ravi Chakrabarti in the CW series iZombie (2015–2019). He has worked repeatedly with director Mike Flanagan, playing Owen Sharma in The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), Sheriff Hassan in Midnight Mass (2021) and Napoleon Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher (2023).
