MINDY KALING

The star of The Office and The Mindy Project, 42, goes behind the camera as the creator and a producer of The Sex Lives of College Girls (Nov. 18 on HBO Max). The new comedy-drama series follows four freshmen roommates at a prestigious New England college.

How would you describe the female roommates at Essex College? I wanted to show young women who come in with a really strong point of view. Kimberly [Pauline Chalamet] wants to be a Supreme Court justice. Leighton [Reneé Rapp] will be in [Phi Beta] Kappa. Whitney [Alyah Chanelle Scott] wants to go pro [soccer]. None of them are demure, standing in the shadows. They come in with real purpose, and one is to have a lot of sex.

Was your main goal in college to write for the humor magazine? One thing that I share with Bela, the character that Amrit Kaur plays, is my single-minded desire to become a comedy writer. I’ve had that urge since I was 16 years old.

How much of the show is based on your real-life college experience at Dartmouth, where you drew a comic strip for the school newspaper? It’s not autobiographical. The campus magazine in this show is a mix of a lot of different inspired literary [publications] that these colleges take a lot of pride in, that are hard to get into and that attract a certain kind of people.

Do you feel like this is the spiritual sister to your Netflix series Never Have I Ever? One thing that a lot of my shows and projects have in common is young women who have big personalities and big ambitions.

Did you keep diaries in high school and college from which you can now pull story ideas? No, I wish I had. Even to this day, I have no sense of self-reflection. That’s why [research] trips to colleges were incredibly useful because they triggered memories, and we also got to hear the experiences of now. We didn’t want to be one of those nostalgia shows where you hear [the rock band] Chumbawamba, and you’re like, “Is this 2001?” We really did want to make sure that we nailed it for 2021.