Why Aziz Ansari, Keanu Reeves and Seth Rogen Are Praying for a Little ‘Good Fortune’

Several weeks into filming Good Fortune — a low-key comedy written by, directed by and starring Aziz Ansari — Keanu Reeves, legendary action star of the Matrix and John Wick movies, threw the production into complete chaos.

In the film, Reeves plays a bumbling, low-ranking angel who swaps the lives of Ansari, a down-on-his-luck L.A. gig worker, and Seth Rogen, a wealthy tech exec living the good life in the Hollywood Hills. The three actors were filming a lighthearted scene, shuffling excitedly between a hot sauna and cold plunge, when Reeves’ foot caught on some flooring.

“My knee went,” Reeves, 60, recounts on a recent Sunday morning, seated beside his two Good Fortune co-stars at the colorful Whitby Hotel in midtown Manhattan. (He’s currently in town rehearsing with his Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure co-star Alex Winter for a Broadway production of Waiting for Godot.) “I snapped my kneecap vertically, like a potato chip. As the pain was coming up, I was like, ‘Oh fuck. This is not good. This is quite bad.’ There was a lot of blood.”

Ansari took in the unfolding nightmare and began to panic. Good Fortune was his plan B. Plan A had been a very different film, a passion project about aging and death called Being Mortal, which was shuttered three weeks into production after its star, Bill Murray, was found by Searchlight Pictures to have engaged in “inappropriate behavior” with a female assistant, a stroke of bad luck that painfully echoed Ansari’s own brush with #MeToo allegations some years prior.

In any case, Ansari had no plan C.

“It still feels like something from The Studio,” he says, referring to Rogen’s hit Apple TV+ comedy — a show fueled by behind-the-scenes Hollywood mayhem. On cue, Rogen, 43, slips into his Studio character, Matt Remick, frazzled head of Continental Studios: “Keanu broke his kneecap! He can’t walk! What can he do? Can we prop him up? Can we hang him from wires? We’ll marionette him in the scene!” Then the famous Seth Rogen laugh: “Heh heh heh heh heh!”

Ansari also laughs about it — now. “Keanu could have easily been like, ‘Hey man, I’m so sorry. I’m out,’ ” he says. Raised on Reeves’ films like Point Break, Speed and The Matrix, his star was so much more than just another actor — he was a screen god and, as far as Ansari was concerned, a major casting coup. Minus Reeves, his dreams of a career as a movie auteur were spiraling down the drain once more.

But Reeves pushed through the pain to film whatever they could on schedule, then stuck around for reshoots once the cast came off. The results of all that literal blood, sweat and tears will finally be unveiled Sept. 6, when the film premieres at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, just weeks before opening wide Oct. 17 throughout the U.S.

For Ansari, the stakes for his little angel movie are of biblical proportions. A gifted observational stand-up and sketch comedian who found stardom playing the smarmy Tom Haverford on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, it’s been a full decade since the launch of his Netflix show, Masters of None, a television groundbreaker that ushered in a new era of diverse storytelling, cracking the doors open for a wave of lauded series like Insecure, Atlanta and Ramy. It’s been nearly eight years since an anonymous woman accused him of unwanted sexual aggression while on a date, kicking up a fierce debate about the growing power of the #MeToo movement, a devastating blow to Ansari’s sterling image as comedy’s “woke bae,” as one website dubbed him in 2016. And it’s been three years since the shock of Searchlight Pictures pulling the plug on Being Mortal, the project that was supposed to launch his feature film directing career.

So, yes, how audiences receive Good Fortune means a great deal to Ansari. It means everything.

***

Two mornings later, Ansari occupies a corner table on the terrace of another swanky hotel in lower Manhattan — this one to remain nameless, as it’s his favored pied-à-terre.

He has, since 2019, headquartered himself in London, where he lives with his wife, Serena Skov Campbell, a Danish forensic data scientist. But he’s frequently in New York and Los Angeles, he says, as well as on the road doing stand-up. His current Hypothetical Tour, which explores married life and his hopes to become a father, featured a date at Radio City Music Hall in April and was recently extended into November.

Up close, Ansari appears younger than his 42 years, although a bit spent. He only orders coffee. He had a late dinner, he explains, and the restaurant’s signature dish of sheep’s milk ricotta and honey on toast isn’t exactly calling his name. “It has truffles in it,” he says. “I don’t like truffles.”

Ansari saw Weapons over the weekend, the blockbuster horror film about a classroom of missing children. “It’s cool, it’s sophisticated and it’s interesting. I was really glad it did well,” he says. “Zach Cregger, the writer-director, he was in my generation of comedy. He was in the sketch group The Whitest Kids U’Know. We were friends in the scene.”

The scene he refers to is the underground New York comedy world of the early aughts. Ansari grew up in South Carolina, one of two sons to immigrant parents from India, both doctors. (They’d later dabble in acting, playing his mother and father on Master of None.) He moved to New York in 2000 to attend NYU’s Stern School of Business and immersed himself in the city’s thriving improv and stand-up culture, where he quickly became a standout.

“I have been a fan since I saw him play a Criss Angel-type magician on Human Giant,” says Judd Apatow, referring to the MTV sketch comedy series that ran from 2007 to 2008. “When you see him at a comedy club, he will do a set and kill, then immediately sit down, put in ear buds and listen and take notes about how it went. Nobody works harder than him.”

Apatow cast Ansari as Randy Springs, an obnoxious comic, in his 2009 film Funny People. It was on that set — and the set of that year’s much darker comedy Observe and Report — that Ansari and Rogen first developed a kinship and comedy shorthand. “Aziz and Seth have always been way more than comic actors,” says Apatow. “They are both unique comic forces of nature who have unique visions all their own.”

Years later, that vision was what would draw Reeves into their sphere. “When you have the chance to work with two comedy masters,” he says, “you go for it.” Back then, though, Ansari was still learning from a crew of other comedy masters — Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Adam Scott, to name a few — when he was cast in 2008 on Parks and Recreation, the follow-up sitcom from the showrunners of NBC’s The Office. Ansari’s character became an instant fan favorite — an aspiring entertainment mogul with his own bizarre patois (his personal mantra, “Treat yo’ self,” launched itself into the popular lexicon).

It was on Parks that Ansari encountered a writer named Alan Yang. “We were both very young, and we just got along very quickly,” he explains. “What happens on those shows is you get along with one of the writers and then maybe you go off and do your own show together.”

That indeed is what happened. Ansari still remembers sitting in Ted Sarandos’ office in late 2014 when he and Yang pitched Master of None as a modern, ethnically diverse take on the “young people living in New York” genre. There were three posters on Sarandos’ wall: Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards and Lilyhammer. “Those were their only shows at the time,” Ansari recalls. “But they just seemed to really get it. Ted was like, ‘We will go with this right away.’ “

“It was initially a little bit more skewed toward the dating angle, following a young single guy in New York,” recalls Yang, 42, now a producer on Good Fortune. During one particularly frustrating writing session, Yang mentioned how their stress “would never rival the struggles my parents had when they were younger. My dad didn’t have enough food to eat as a kid — he had to kill and eat his pet chicken just to survive. Aziz really responded to that and started sharing stories his parents told him. We then broadened the scope of the show.”

Along for the ride was another gifted young writer from Parks and Rec: Harris Wittels. In early February 2015, Ansari informed Wittels — whom he describes as “one of the funniest people I’ve ever met” — that he wouldn’t just be writing on the show, he’d be starring on it as Ansari’s best friend. Wittels, who had been open about his addiction issues, fatally overdosed on heroin six days later. “I thought he’d been dealing with this stuff,” says Ansari, wiping away a tear. “I was very naive about addiction. I thought, ‘Well, if you decided you’re getting help, everything’s fine.’ And then you get that phone call — and it’s a complete shock.”

The show went on, however, and to great acclaim, with the second season’s “Thanksgiving” widely considered a series high point. It features the lesbian character played by co-star Lena Waithe — who along with Ansari took home a comedy series writing Emmy for the episode, making her the first Black woman to win in that category — coming out to her family at Thanksgiving dinner.

“And then the third season I turned into a lesbian drama,” he deadpans. Indeed, Ansari blew up his show’s winning formula and focused season three — filmed through 2020 and 2021, with COVID interruptions — on Waithe’s character and her breakup with her wife (Naomi Ackie). At the urging of mentor Apatow — who advised him to “try to direct as much as you can” — Ansari helmed all five episodes of the season.

“There were so many of those kinds of shows on the air at that point that I didn’t want to do it anymore,” he says of the creative overhaul. “I had this aggressive idea of like, ‘Let’s do the show again, but take away everything people like about it. Let’s really challenge ourselves.’ It was fun, and we pulled it off, but I also do understand why people were like, ‘Hey, what did you do?’ “

Between the show’s second and third seasons, Ansari was thrown yet another curveball. On Jan. 13, 2018, accusations of sexual misconduct were leveled at Ansari on a little-known website — the now-defunct Babe.net, which billed itself as being “for girls who don’t give a fuck” — in an instantly viral account titled, “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life.”

The anonymous accuser detailed meeting Ansari at a 2017 Emmys afterparty, where he was celebrating his “Thanksgiving” writing win. That led to a dinner date, which soon redirected to Ansari’s Tribeca loft. There she was “pressured” into having sex with Ansari, who behaved, she said, like a “horny, rough, entitled 18-year-old. … I cried the whole ride home. At that point I felt violated.”

The story lit a firestorm over the power and reach of #MeToo as well as becoming a flashpoint in journalistic ethics with regard to the movement. In a New York Times op-ed, Bari Weiss declared the story “the worst thing to happen” to #MeToo since the movement ignited with that paper’s reporting on Harvey Weinstein in October 2017.

Ansari issued a statement, saying he took the encounter to be “completely consensual” and was “surprised and concerned” when the woman told him the following day that not all “seemed OK” with what transpired. “I took her words to heart and responded privately after taking the time to process what she had said,” he said.

His next public remarks on the matter came in his July 2019 Netflix comedy special, Aziz Ansari: Right Now. “There’s times I felt scared, there’s times I felt humiliated, there’s times I felt embarrassed, and ultimately I just felt terrible that this person felt this way,” he told the audience at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. “I always think about a conversation I had with one of my friends where he was like: ‘You know what, man? That whole thing made me think about every date I’ve ever been on.’ And I thought, ‘Wow! That’s pretty incredible.’ If this made not just me but other people be more thoughtful, then that’s a good thing, and that’s how I feel about it.”

Ansari drew some criticism for not addressing the accuser directly in his special, to which he responds, “I mean, I apologized to the person personally, right? When it happened.” And he rejects the notion that he took a hiatus in the wake of the controversy, saying, “It wasn’t really a break, per se. I did that tour, and I wanted to address it in the special because people were curious about how I felt about the whole experience. So I felt like I had to talk about it in the special.”

Rogen has not been shy about taking public stances with matters of sexual misconduct — most notably with his onetime cohort and collaborator James Franco, who in 2018 was hit with his own long list of accusations. In 2021, Rogen confirmed in an interview with The Times of London that those accusations “changed many things in our relationship and our dynamic” and that “I have not and I do not plan to” work with Franco again, a pledge he thus far has kept.

Ansari has drawn no such rebuke from Rogen. On the contrary, the two had been planning to collaborate for some time — and finally got their chance with Being Mortal, in which Rogen played the son of a dying Murray. Keke Palmer, who plays Ansari’s love interest in Good Fortune, was cast as Rogen’s wife in the film. “She’s so funny, but there’s also a depth to her,” says Ansari, and cites her viral 2021 Met Gala red carpet interview of Megan Thee Stallion as having won him over to her idiosyncratic charms.

Ansari had about three-quarters of Being Mortal in the can when a female production assistant accused Murray of climbing on top of her in a bed and kissing her through their COVID masks. The studio launched an internal investigation, found the claim to have merit and canceled the shoot. Despite the implosion, Ansari still holds out hope that he one day will be able to complete his vision — with Murray intact. “He was devastated,” he says of his star. “He couldn’t believe it happened. I think this movie meant a lot to him.”

When the story broke in the media a few weeks after production shut down, Ansari’s phone blew up. “Everybody’s texting me, ‘Oh, Aziz, I’m so sorry,’ ” he recalls. “And I said, ‘Oh God, I can’t live in this woe-is-me moment.’ ” He had a rough version of Good Fortune sitting on his laptop. “And so I called Seth,” he continues. “I said, ‘Hey, I know you’re supposed to be filming Being Mortal, so you’re free today. This is a shitty day for me. If you want to help me, read this, tell me if you want to do it.’ “

Rogen called him two hours later and said he was in. It was, the actor says, an easy decision. To Rogen, the script wasn’t just funny, but it put a spotlight on a new breed of working-class Americans. “We were saying as we were making it, ‘If this movie does nothing else, I hope maybe people tip their DoorDash a little bit more after they watch it,’ ” Rogen explains. “Because one bad review — someone’s annoyed that they didn’t put the sauce in the thing — can really fuck your shit up. We found very comedic ways to do it, but it’s very real, and you haven’t really yet seen something from that person’s perspective.”

Good Fortune follows Ansari’s character, Arj, a documentary editor living in Los Angeles who is failing to keep his head above water. When we meet him, he’s essentially homeless, sleeping in his car and showering at the YMCA while shuffling between gig-economy jobs that require him to do demeaning things like standing in line to buy someone a trendy cinnamon bun. (That scene was shot on the same L.A. block as Courage Bagels, where people regularly queue up for their wares.)

One of Arj’s first lines of dialogue is, “The American dream is dead.” It easily could have served as a downbeat tagline for the film. “I think my character represents a frustration that a lot of people feel right now,” Ansari explains. “A lot of people are working two or three jobs, and rent and everything else has gone up so much, but wages have not. People are struggling so much just to get by, and there’s a frustration of, ‘How is this the deal?’ “

The kernel of the film came to him when he imagined two contrasting Angelenos of the same age: “One guy is the guy that’s been screwed by the past 20 years, burdened with student debt, doing anything he can to scrape by. And then there’s the other guy, who works in tech and has investments and lives in this giant house with a pool. In L.A., those people cross paths all the time. That was interesting to me. What happens if their worlds collide — and where does it go from there?”

That second character, the one played by Rogen, is Jeff, an entitled, selfish and mostly unlikable venture capitalist. Still, both Ansari and Rogen admit they are a lot closer to Jeff than they are to Arj.

“That is us making fun of ourselves, no doubt about it,” Ansari notes. “We are Jeff. We are a little bit more thoughtful than he is. But do we have a cold plunge and a sauna? I think we both do. I wanted to make us uncomfortable. Because you can watch Succession and be someone like me and be like, ‘Hey, that’s not me. That’s crazy.’ But a lot of the people I know have cold plunges. When I gave the script to Evan Goldberg, Seth’s writing partner, he was like, ‘Oh, this is uncomfortable — I’m reading this in my sauna.’ ”

Ansari attempted as best as he could to accurately capture the complexities of economic struggle in 2025 America. “It’s such a sensitive thing, you don’t want to get this stuff wrong,” he explains. In researching the script, he consulted with experts like Matthew Wolfe, a sociologist he worked with on Being Mortal, as well as economist Juliet Schor and Brian Goldstone, author of the new book There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.

When the angel idea came to him — he cites everything from It’s a Wonderful Life to Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire as inspiration — the plot clicked into place. He had originally pitched Rogen on playing the winged part, but Rogen gravitated to the rich tech bro. And so they batted around a few names. “When Keanu came up, I just was like, ‘Keanu Reeves? Really? That’s possible? That would be incredible!’ ” Ansari says.

Reeves was impressed with the script and, after meeting with Ansari in London, agreed to sign on for one of the most playful roles of his career (a scene with Rogen at a burger joint in which the angel learns to eat for the first time is an inspired bit of physical comedy). Still, Reeves didn’t just play the part for laughs. He came into it knowing this was a movie with a message and he literally broke a leg doing justice to the role. And — who knows — perhaps that snapped kneecap somehow enhanced his performance, helping him find the tortured soul of his demoted angel, who takes up drinking and smoking once he finds himself stranded on Earth.

“There are sociological, cultural, wage-disparity and status questions being investigated in the film with a really delicate hand — but a hand,” says the actor, his knee now fully recovered. “I think that’s what elevates the film. It hopefully brings around some kind of understanding, compassion and empathy. I think that’s what makes it a work of art.”

This story appeared in the Sep. 3 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.