Comedy recast

Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling team up for a smart comedy about what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated workplace, writes Hannah-Rose Yee

ONE OF Mindy Kaling’s favourite things to do while filming her new movie Late Night was to find a quiet corner at the back of the set so that she could watch her co-star Emma Thompson work.

In the workplace comedy, Kaling stars as first-time writer Molly Patel, a diversity hire desperately drafted to save legendary talk show host Katherine Newbury (Thompson) from being fired from her television series.

At first, Molly and Katherine struggle to find common ground. But, soon, the pair are bonding over the shared language of being the only woman in a room of white men wearing boat shoes. In many ways, Late Night is as much a romantic comedy as it is a workplace comedy. It’s just that instead of falling for a man, Molly falls for Katherine, and what Katherine represents as an ambitious, successful woman.

Kaling wrote the script and produced the film, and though she has a starring role it is Thompson who has the bulk of the movie’s lines.

So there were many moments on the short, 25-day shoot when Kaling had the opportunity to see Thompson make a three-course, Michelin-starred meal of all her delicious dialogue.

“I loved acting with Emma,” Kaling tells Time Out. “But it was even more pleasurable to watch her,” she says. “I could’ve looked forever. We had such a tiring schedule — Emma shot 14, 16-hour days. So to be able to see her always operating on this level was a marvel to watch.”

Kaling’s pleasure isn’t hers alone. Anyone who buys a ticket to Late

Night is buying a ticket to see Thompson at the top of her game, giving a nuanced, lived-in performance as a woman fighting to maintain her position at the top of the male-dominated world of comedy.

The role of a formidable female boss like Katherine could have been a two-dimensional one. Think of Katherine as a Miranda Priestly figure, inspiring fear and devotion wherever she deploys her sharptongued wit.

But the beauty of Thompson’s performance and Kaling’s clever script is in how Katherine subverts all the stereotypes of a nightmare leader. She’s terrifying, yes — we should build entire cities in tribute to the way Thompson delivers the line “Don’t start any sentence with ‘as a female’, it’s tacky,” — but she’s inspiring, too. And she’s hiding depths of insecurity despite her years of success.

“I don’t think she’s arrogant,” Thompson says. “I think she’s just insistent upon being extremely good. So she has to work extremely hard, and always has done.”

It’s still true, then, that women have to work harder in order to rise to the top?

“Of course it’s still true,” Thompson exclaims. “Women have got to be better, it’s still true.”

And nowhere is this more evident than in the world of comedy. Late Night examines the notion of a diversity hire when Molly is plucked from obscurity to become the only non-white, nonmale, non-beige-slacks-wearing employee on Katherine’s payroll.

“I wish I was a woman of colour so I could get any job I want without qualification,” one of her scruffy colleagues on Late Night

With Katherine Newbury moans. (The foot-stamping is silent.) But this was Kaling’s real-life experience when she was first cast on The Office in 2004 as the only woman in a writing staff of eight.

“When you succeed, and you’re the only Indian woman in your career, you think ‘Wow, I must be so special and so good,”’ Kaling says. “But the sad truth is much less of a compliment to you, which is that, no, there’s just been such little access to other people that look like you.”

As Thompson puts it: “You have to understand that opportunities for women are very, very different than opportunities for men. Men have a motorway down which many men have driven many cars. It’s clear. The road is there. There are signposts.”

Women, on the other hand, have a “mountain pass”, Thompson jokes. “With gullies and rivers to cross,” she adds.

“There are no signposts . . . There’s no motorway. There’s no path that we’ve always walked on, and therefore there’s no recognisable route. So of course, it’s difficult.”

For Thompson, the solution is to keep making movies like Late Night that centre on the female experience, both for women of colour and for women outside the restrictive age bracket that Hollywood has deemed relevant. (As Katherine jokes at one point in the movie: “I’ll need a facelift to play the voice of a wise tree in a Pixar movie.”)

“We set out to write a funny movie,” Kaling says. “By virtue of the fact that the two leads are women, and one is a minority woman and both are over the age of 35, it has become a political statement to people who watch it . . . I’ve been very surprised by that.”

Thompson adds: “The nature of this conversation is completely different to if we were Seth Rogen and Will Ferrell sitting here, having written a comedy about two men in the workplace.”

Thompson doesn’t set much store by the outdated, sexist notion that women can’t be funny. “If women didn’t have a sense of humour, we would have died out long, long ago,” Thompson deadpans.

The past year has been a big one for Thompson. In November, she accepted a damehood and in April she turned 60.

“I think it’s very important to say that I’m old, because I like that,” Thompson says.

“I think that people are frightened and in denial about ageing. Everyone complains about it being an ageist world, well, why then when I say I’m old do [people] say ‘you’re not old’, as though somehow I’ve got to be young?

“But I’m 60,” she says. “That’s not young. And I don’t want it to be. I want it to mean what it means. I want us to feel what we feel, and be what we are when we’re 60 . . . I’ve been working for 40 years. I have a gravitas and a wisdom that I would not have had when I was younger.”

And how lucky for us that we get to watch Thompson use both.