Who is the “star” of Mira Nair’s The Namesake?

Mira Nair’s The Namesake recently opened here in London, and posters advertising the film have been scattered all across the Underground stations. I recently noticed a dramatic difference in the poster design between the United Kingdom and North America.

As you can see in the North American one-sheet above, the primary focus in the advert is Kal Penn. Penn is quite the star now, especially after the very-popular Harold & Kumar movie, and will do a lot to draw people to Nair’s film. I do think that Penn’s selling power in the United Kingdom may be a bit more limited, as the British poster almost omits Penn entirely in favor of focusing on stars Irfan Khan and Tabu.

I’m sure a good chunk of the readers of this site will actually be unaware of these two Indian cinema stars outside the context of The Namesake, as the infiltration of Bollywood culture has been relatively slow in most parts of North America. Not so in the United Kingdom, where the recent wedding of Aishwarya and Abhishek was front-page (quite literally) news over the weekend. It makes sense that the target audience for The Namesake here in London would be more like to relate to Irfan Khan or Tabu rather than Kal Penn.

I’m not quite sure what point I was trying to make here (or if I was trying to make a point at all), but I do find it fascinating that that the “maind-draw star” of a movie can be so different from region to region.