COMEDIAN. WRITER. ACTOR. MOTHER. PRODUCER. FRENCH TOAST MAKER. Mindy Kaling opens up about ambition, single motherhood and her latest film

Her CV is a head spin but, as Mindy Kaling tells Alice Jones, she’s more than up for the challenge

Mindy Kaling is a woman who just doesn’t stop. Her first feature film, Late Night, which she wrote and starred in – and is one of Amazon’s most expensive acquisitions ever – is out this June. As well as that, she’s shooting her TV adaptation of Four Weddings And A Funeral, and is writing a new sitcom for Netflix. And, on the morning we speak, she was up at 6am, making French toast for her daughter, Katherine, before doing this interview in the car on her way to a photoshoot. It’s when life is this full that she’s happiest; she struggles with downtime. ‘I find relaxing to be very challenging,’ she says, somewhat unnecessarily. ‘I’m still trying to figure out the best way to do it. To me, a holiday would be to work from home, so I can do three hours of writing, then spend an hour with my daughter, then do three more hours of writing, then cook and hang out with my daughter.’ That doesn’t sound like a holiday. ‘Noooo,’ she protests with a laugh. ‘It would feel like a holiday.’

As we talk, Kaling comes across as thoughtful, funny and mischievously honest. And she’s extremely self-aware. On the subject of interviews, she tells me, ‘There’s a pressure. You think, “What are the 20 anecdotes about my life that are both relatable and offer a window into my world that don’t make me seem like I’m this out-of-touch, one-percenter actress?”’ Not for her: the usual lame protestations that celebrity gets in the way of the ‘real’ work. ‘Anyone who has any fame would be lying if they didn’t say that it makes life easier,’ she says.

Unlike her characters in The Office and The Mindy Project, who often act on blind, ditsy instinct, saying the first thing that comes into their heads, Kaling is considered and treats questions carefully, like problems to be solved. Like a good conversation with your cleverest friend, she makes you want to up your game, while taking you in directions you don’t necessarily expect. She loves

fashion, hair and make-up. ‘It’s one of the nice parts of my job; that, and getting dinner reservations.’ But she’ll also point out all the times she’s turned up for photoshoots to find make-up artists and stylists who are unprepared to work with what she is: a 38-year-old Indianamerican woman ‘with hips that will definitely knock over your drink if you are sitting next to me on a plane’. In other words, Mindy Kaling doesn’t really do bullshit.

In Late Night, Kaling plays Molly, a comedy newcomer who gets a job on a late-night talk show, where she is the only woman and the only person of colour in the writers’ room. Dame Emma Thompson plays her boss, Katherine Newbury, the show’s indomitable and abrasive host. Think The Devil Wears Prada but set in a TV studio in a post-#metoo era. ‘I’ve waited 14 years to write a movie because I was waiting for a story where I felt like only I could tell it,’ says Kaling. ‘It really crystallised when I thought, “Oh, I can identify wholly with both female leads.”’

Kaling’s first proper job in television was on the American adaptation of The Office. She was hired when she was 24 years old, having been spotted playing Ben Affleck (really) in an off-broadway play she co-wrote and starred in. Things were a lot different then.

‘I can remember it like it was yesterday, what it was like to be on a writing staff as the only woman and the only person of colour,’ she adds. ‘It was horribly intimidating. I wasn’t sure how much I was supposed to talk, so some days I would feel I talked too much and the next day I would over-correct by being silent. It took the first season for me to become less nervous and to make friends and feel like

I was really part of the show.’

In the film, Molly is dismissed as a ‘diversity hire’, who has taken the job off another (white male) staffer’s brother, who also applied. In real life, Kaling got her job at NBC through a diversity programme, the implications of which she initially struggled with. ‘For years, that was something

I felt really embarrassed about – like I’d got a leg-up on other writers,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t until recently that I realised the access that programme

‘I’VE WAITED FOR A STORY ONLY I COULD TELL’

gave me was the exact access that most writers get. People hire their cronies and people who look like them, because that’s what they feel comfortable with.’

She is cautiously pleased that, in the past five years, the industry has changed for the better, and points out that the environment in which she came up, on The Office, ‘couldn’t exist’ in 2019. Some places have been slower to catch up; she tells me that she set the film on a talk show because it struck her as even more macho than the comedy world: ‘You watch the Emmys and you see a show win and the entire staff get up and they’re all white men.’

Kaling has grafted for many years to get to where she is now, and the hard work has paid off. She wrote more than 20 episodes of The Office, for which she received an Emmy nomination in 2010, and starred in it for eight series as Kelly Kapoor. From there, she created her own show, The Mindy Project, in which she starred as Dr Mindy Lahiri, a gynaecologist who is obsessed with celebrity, fashion and finding Mr Right; it ran for six series.

If Molly was inspired by the early years of Kaling’s career, Thompson’s character Katherine grew out of her latter experiences as a showrunner. Katherine is so dismissive of her writers; she gives them all numbers, rather than bothering to learn their names. ‘That’s something a sitcom star actually did,’ marvels Kaling. ‘I thought it was incredible. So demeaning.’

Surely she’s not that terrible a manager?

‘I think I’m a generous but very demanding boss,’ she admits. ‘I am incredibly impatient; that’s one of my defining qualities as a person and as an artist – it’s a thing I share with Katherine. Impatience is a cousin to cruelty, so I have to keep that in check. A lot. I’m still a work in progress.’

In her 2015 book Why Not Me?, Kaling writes about the process of getting The Mindy Project to screen. When the pilot is rejected by NBC, she sits in her trailer and weeps. ‘I had thought it went without saying that I would one day have a show on NBC,’ she wrote at the time. ‘It felt like destiny.’

Was she always so ambitious? Yes, but her attitude towards ambition and what it means has changed. ‘I always felt like someone who wants to be in TV and feels like they have a voice that needs to be heard,’ she adds. ‘I’m just as ambitious, or more so, than all the white showrunners who are men. But it is talked about more for women. Ambition is not considered to be an attractive quality for women, whereas it is in a man. The only thing that has deterred my ambition has been the birth of my daughter. That has made me want to do other things beside work,’ she adds.

Her daughter, Katherine ‘Kit’ Kaling, was born in December 2017. Kaling has never revealed the father’s name and is raising Kit alone. Occasionally, she posts pictures of the pair of them in matching pyjamas, always careful not to show her daughter’s face. Today, however, she is warm and open on the subject of becoming a mother, which has clearly turned her life upside down.

‘I found the first month after I had my baby to be one of the most challenging times of my life,’ she says. She didn’t have post-natal depression, but she did find herself grieving all over again for her mother, an obstetrician and gynaecologist, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2012, on the day that The Mindy Project was greenlit. Katherine’s middle name is Swati, after her grandmother.

‘Physically, the delivery was difficult and I was really confronted with [thoughts of] my mother…’ She pauses for the first time in our chat. ‘I had obviously missed her for many years,’ she adds, ‘but I remember feeling the injustice; I took it very hard. It would have been incredibly vital to my life to have both a mom and someone who knew literally everything I was talking about.’

Now, she says, being a mother is ‘one of the most sustaining, wonderful parts of my life. It’s a different kind of enjoyment than the group laugh of being in a writers’ room or watching a cut that feels good.’ She sighs. ‘I can’t imagine anyone saying anything more trite about motherhood than it’s been rewarding. But I feel rewarded every day with her presence.’

Her best friend, BJ Novak, has been a great support. They met on The Office, playing on-off couple Kelly and Ryan, and dated on and off in real life. In Why Not Me?, Kaling describes their relationship as ‘weird as hell’. Is it? She laughs. ‘What would I say our relationship is? He’s just a great close friend. And our friendship has actually got even closer since I had my daughter.

I’ve been able to see this other side of him first hand – which is how good he is with kids. That’s been very nice.’ I ask if she’s dating now but am shut down, politely. ‘I don’t talk about that side of my life because it becomes too interesting. But thank you for asking.’

While her ambition shifted when she became a mum, her work ethic didn’t diminish. Kaling shot Late Night in 25 days last year, breastfeeding between takes. ‘It’s funny when you’re someone like me and you have a baby; it really means that you just get a little bit worse at your day job. It’s not like you balance stuff perfectly,’ she explains. ‘Luckily, I was working at such a fever-pitch level beforehand that no one minded that I take an extra day to send back notes on a cut. You can go at a bit of a slower pace and still be incredibly efficient.’

She is certainly efficient. Recently she was in London shooting her new mini-series, Four Weddings And A Funeral. ‘If someone like me is going to adapt such an iconic movie, what am I bringing to it? For me, it’s the way that we cast it.’ Black British actor Nathalie

Emmanuel (Game Of Thrones) and Nikesh Patel (Indian Summers), who is British Pakistani, play the leads. ‘The film is so perfect, so funny and so authentic that I didn’t want to do a strict adaptation,’ says Kaling. ‘We’ve taken what we believe is the spirit of it.’

Meanwhile, she’s also writing a new comedy for Netflix, about an Indianamerican teenage girl. It’s not based on her own childhood, although, inevitably, her early years growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will shape it. Again, the influence of her daughter shines through, having made her more driven to reflect on her own family life, telling me that ‘since I had a kid, I have found what I’ve wanted to write about is my parents’.

She clearly thrives on being busy, but for Kaling, that also means being content. ‘Right now, I’m feeling pretty good about the shows that I’m creating and the opportunities I’m providing,’ she says, joyfully.

‘I feel a little more satiated now than I used to. But then I watch one good movie, such as Jordan Peele’s Us, and I feel so inspired in a million different directions. I like to think of myself as inspired rather than ambitious.

Yes. That’s where I’m at right now.’

‘AMBITION IS NOT CONSIDERED AN ATTRACTIVE QUALITY FOR WOMEN’