American Idol season 8 finalist Anoop Desai will play a major recurring role in the fourth season of the FX series, What We Do in the Shadows, appearing in six of 10 episodes.
The hit comedy series, reports Deadline, based on the 2014 film by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi, involves the antics of vampire roommates Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Laszlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch) as they navigate the modern world of Staten Island with the help of their human familiar, Guillermo (Harvey Guillén).
Anoop will play an acquaintance of Nandor’s from his ancestral homeland. Executive Producers on the series are Paul Simms, Clement, Waititi, Stefani Robinson, Garrett Basch and Eli Bush. The show produced by FX Productions has already been renewed for fifth and sixth seasons, and will return for its fourth on July 12 at 10 p.m. ET/PT on FX.
After Anoop finished in 6th place on season 8 in 2009, he pursued a career as an R&B singer. And then, in 2016 and 2017, the singer released a series of well regarded hip-hop tracks under the mysterious moniker TOTEM. In interviews with major publications like Billboard, he didn’t reveal his birth name or discuss his past as a singing show contestant.
But lately, Anoop has been taking on the acting world with a guest starring role in the second season of Netflix’s critically acclaimed series Russian Doll. He previously appeared on the Apple TV+ series Little Voice and Showtime’s Billions.
The North Carolina native graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He got his first taste of acting in the late 90s playing the character “Raj” in the WRAL children’s show CentralXpress.com. The show focused on a group of students maintaining the school’s Web site. It tackled serious issues such as race and death. It ran from 1997 to 2001.
