Karan Brar Talks Acting, Accents, and Jessie!

Karan Brar is a 14-year-old actor who got his start as Chirag Gupta in the Diary Of a Wimpy Kid franchise. Today, the young actor is best known as Ravi Ross in the Disney Channel's Jessie.

We spoke to Karan recently about how he kickstarted his acting career and about what it's like to be a part of the Jessie cast!

When Karan was 7 years old, his father told him about how he used to be an actor in college.

He asked me if I wanted to try it, and I did!" Karan said. "I fell in love with acting."
When he had been acting for about three years, Karan auditioned for the role of Chirag Gupta in Diary Of a Wimpy Kid. He did an amazing job in the audition and has since gone on to star in three Wimpy Kid movies!

Today, Karan is a fan favorite as Ravi Ross on the Disney Channel's Jessie. In the original script, the character was a South American boy named Javier, but Karan's audition convinced the Jessie team to recreate the role just for him.

"Landing a role on Jessie was a dream come true!" Karan said. "And it was so cool that they changed the role just for me! What was even cooler is that Cameron [Boyce] and I both auditioned for the same role, but they liked us both so they cast us both and created 'Luke' and 'Ravi'!"

In the show, Karan's character Ravi has a giant water monitor lizard named Mrs. Kipling. The 7-foot-long reptile's real name is Frank, and spends a lot of time sharing the set with the actors.

"I work with Frank a lot actually," Karan said. "At first I was scared of him, but after a while I realized he wasn't that scary!"

Thought Karan adopts an Indian accent in many of his roles, he doesn't have the accent in real life. It took a lot of work with a dialect coach to get the accent just right!

"Learning it is actually the hard part," Karan said of learning accents, "but applying it to the scene isn't too difficult."

Karan's excellent acting has led to multiple nominations for the Young Artist Award. So far, he's won three!

"The first time I received a Young Artist Award was so exciting!" Karan said. "I cant even describe how excited I was! To keep winning awards is as exciting as the first time I won a Young Artist Award!"

One of the perks of acting on the set of Jessie is working with amazing Debby Ryan.

"Working with Debby is amazing," Karan said. "She is more than a coworker to me, she's like my sister! I've learned so much from her about acting that I could never learn from any teacher!"

In the near future, Karan plans to plans to focus on playing Ravi in Jessie, but that doesn't mean he doesn't plan to branch out.

"I hope to do a film soon because I haven't done one in a while!" Karan said. "I've always wanted to do an action movie!!!"

You can catch Karan in new episodes of Jessie on The Disney Channel on Friday evenings!

He also has a YouTube channel. He just uploaded a new video about summer! Check it out here!