Kunal Nayyar’s Guilty Geek Pleasures

The Big Bang Theory star reveals what gets his geeky side going

CBS comedy The Big Bang Theory has become a top-10 smash, and co-star Kunal Nayyar plays Raj, a top-10 geek. “I feel like I’m almost stuck in the middle,” says Nayyar. “I’m not cool enough to be cool but I’m not cool enough to be a nerd. I think to be a real nerd you have to be kind of cool and I’m just stuck in the middle.” We felt Nayyar was just nerdy enough for us to ask him for his personal list of geeky guilty pleasures.

Lord of The Rings Trilogy
“I’ve seen all three multiple times now. At the end of January, I did another director’s cut marathon, all three movies. I saw the first one not knowing what to expect because I had never read the books. I freaked out. And so then I went and I got the two books and I read The Two Towers. But then I didn’t want to read Return of the King because I didn’t want to know what happened. And then The Return of the King comes and I go to watch it at midnight, and I start like crying when the opening credits roll. I got so emotional!...I’m such a dork.”

Star Wars: Epic Duels
“It’s a strategy board game. And they have these little figurines of all the characters and each character has a set of cards—attack cards, defend cards, magic cards. In undergrad, a group of us, we had, like, 24-hour marathons. And we’d have teams and we’d almost get into fistfights over this game.”

Madden NFL and NBA Live
“I’m obsessive about Madden and NBA Live. And I start coaching the teams in the middle of the games, even though I’m playing them and controlling the players. I’m like, ‘Come on, run your route, man!’ even though it’s a computer; of course he’s running his route, you know what I mean?”

Ping-Pong
“We have three tables on set. Every time there’s a break, everyone runs to the tables and is, like, ‘Dibs, dibs!’ And we have an annual doubles and singles tournaments. We challenged the cast of Hank, which was a TV show [with Kelsey Grammer] that recently got cancelled, to a big ping-pong tournament and we went there and beat them. We’re obsessive about ping-pong.”

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