Sindhu Vee likens herself to Al Pacino. “You know, the bit in Scarface,” she says, “where he’s sitting behind that big table and there are mounds and mounds of drugs in front of him. You know?” She nods before I can answer. “You know. I’m like that… except the cocaine is comedy, and films, and TV, and everything else.” She clenches her fists. “I want it all.”

As someone who came to comedy late – Vee, 52, only started out in 2012 after turning her back on careers in academia and investment banking – she is relishing being a part of the entertainment world. In addition to being one of the sharpest acts on the stand-up circuit, where she often riffs on family, relationships, race and parenting, she is a regular on panel shows and podcasts. Vee has also acted in Netflix’s Sex Education and the BBC series Starstruck. In 2022, she will portray Mrs. Phelps in Matthew Warchus’s new film adaptation of Matilda.

Vee, who was born in New Delhi, also spent some of her childhood in Lucknow and the Philippines. Her father was a civil servant and her mother was a therapist. She studied political science at the University of Delhi and philosophy, politics and economics at the University of Oxford. “I was a straight up nerd,” she jokes.

Vee had intended to “become a professor or something”. She started graduate studies at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, before switching to the University of Chicago, where she would meet her future husband. There was an assumption within the politics departments, she says, that she would want to focus on “development economics” and south Asian politics. But Vee was fascinated by political theory. “I was like, dude, I am south Asian. I don’t need to study south Asia because I’ve lived it. I wanted to study what interested me. Give me Descartes, give me Hume, Berkeley and Kant.”

Eventually, she became unenthused. “I couldn’t put my finger on it… It was taking a long time. American PhDs take eight years. I felt ground down,” Vee explains.