Zohran Mamdani Once Told His Mother Mira Nair to Turn Down a Harry Potter Film

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani once gave his mother, acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair, some advice that changed the course of her career — he told her not to direct a Harry Potter movie.

Nair, best known for films like Mississippi Masala and Monsoon Wedding, revealed the story during an appearance at the Jaipur Literature Festival in 2018.

She explained that Warner Bros. approached her in the mid-2000s to direct Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, after executives saw her 2004 movie Vanity Fair, which starred Reese Witherspoon.

At the time, however, Nair was already deeply involved in making The Namesake, based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri. The project was especially personal. She was grieving the sudden loss of her mother-in-law, an experience that closely mirrored the themes of loss and displacement in the story.

“I was deep in that melancholy,” Nair said, explaining that the emotion she felt pushed her to tell The Namesake in the most honest way possible.

Although she was only a month away from filming, Nair still went to meetings with Warner Bros. — partly because her son had learned to read through J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. Unsure of what to do, she asked her 14-year-old son for advice.

His answer stuck with her for life.

“He said, ‘Mamma, many good directors can make Harry Potter, but only you can make The Namesake,’” she recalled.

That moment helped Nair realize that she should focus on stories only she could tell. She said that idea — embracing her own voice instead of chasing big franchises — became a guiding principle throughout her career.

The same mindset helped her earlier while making Mississippi Masala, a film about an interracial romance between Denzel Washington and Sarita Choudhury. In a 2022 interview with Slate, Nair recalled how one studio executive asked her to add a white lead character to the story.

Her response was blunt and memorable.

“I said I could promise that all the waiters in the film would be white,” she said. The executive laughed — and then showed her the door.

Nair eventually found another studio willing to back her vision. Looking back, she said that simply showing Black and brown characters together on screen was powerful at the time — and worth fighting for.

Decades later, that same clarity of purpose continues to define her work — and it all traces back to a piece of advice from her teenage son, long before he became mayor of New York City.