Karan Soni

Biography

Karan Soni (born January 8, 1989) is an Indian-born American actor best known for playing Dopinder, the taxi driver in the Deadpool films. His comedic work made him a recognizable face in superhero cinema over the past decade.

Soni was born in New Delhi and attended an international school there before moving to the United States to study business at the University of Southern California. He soon turned to acting. His feature debut came with Safety Not Guaranteed (2012), and he then starred in the series Betas (2013), which Amazon Studios canceled after one season. In 2015 he appeared in Other Space, created by Paul Feig for Yahoo! Screen, a service that shut down before the show could be renewed; its first season was later picked up by another platform. That same year he began a lead role in Blunt Talk opposite Patrick Stewart.

His profile grew with Deadpool (2016), where he played the cabbie Dopinder, a role he reprised in Deadpool 2 (2018) and Deadpool & Wolverine (2024). In 2016 he also appeared in Ghostbusters as the delivery man Benny, and in 2019 in Pokémon Detective Pikachu. From 2019 to 2023 he was a main cast member of the anthology comedy Miracle Workers. In animation, he was announced in 2023 as the voice of Pavitr Prabhakar, the Indian Spider-Man in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and he has confirmed he will return to the role in the sequel. More recently he headlined the romantic comedy A Nice Indian Boy, which premiered at South by Southwest in 2024.

Soni is openly gay and is married to writer and director Roshan Sethi, with whom he developed the film 7 Days. His career has been built largely on memorable supporting roles in comedies and large-scale productions rather than on a conventional leading-man profile.

Key films

• Safety Not Guaranteed (2012): feature debut in a low-budget science fiction comedy.
• Deadpool (2016): as the taxi driver Dopinder, the role that brought him wider recognition.
• Ghostbusters (2016): plays the delivery man Benny in the reboot led by women.
• Deadpool & Wolverine (2024): returns as Dopinder in the third film of the series.
• Unicorn Store (2017): comedy alongside Brie Larson, who also directed it.