At the beginning of the film, when Jess first goes out for the team, Coach Joe (a hunky Jonathan Rhys Meyers) tells her: “I’ve never really seen an Indian girl into football.” And, as journalist Ishani Nath noted in a 2019 CBC article about the musical adaptation, in 2002, (and 2003, when the film was released in North America) the same could be said for seeing South Asian characters on screen outside of Bollywood. As many have pointed out over the years, BILB came out in a time predating a lot of the now-famous South Asian faces we’ve come to know and love. Before Mindy Kaling graced our screens first in The Office and later The Mindy Project, before Lilly Singh’s YouTube empire and subsequent late-night talk show (RIP), before the rise of young South Asian women like Iman Vellani as superheroes and — despite how you might feel about him — even before comedian Russell Peters started making fun of his culture onstage, Jess was running dribbling drills and wheezing through sprints with the Hounslow Harriers.