Kaling back on the job in ‘Late Night’ debut
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Mindy Kaling is putting her first job to work. ❚ For Kaling, anxiety-filled days at her first big network TV job on “The Office” made for the perfect plot of her debut screenplay, “Late Night” (in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expanding nationally June 14). ❚ In the film, she plays Molly Patel, a green but aspiring joke writer tasked with diversifying a once-popular late-night talk show led by no-nonsense comedian Katherine Newbury (Emma Thompson). ❚ Independent movies are “definitely a different kind of anxiety,” says Kaling, 39, sipping on a berry cocktail at the Four Seasons while cracking that her “personality is bad until I’ve had a drink.”
It took her four years to write just disappear,” says Kaling, who “Late Night” before shooting it on a has become a household name shoestring budget and getting it into thanks to a bevy of self-effacing the Sundance Film Festival – where books, her long run as Kelly Kapoor the female-led comedy made headlines on “The Office” (a show she ultimately after selling to Amazon Studios executive-produced) and for a record-breaking $13 million. her Fox/Hulu series, “The Mindy
“There are so many obstacles to Project.” getting the movie out there, and In “Late Night,” Molly is the first there are so many places where everything could go wrong and it could
woman (or person of color, for that matter) hired to work for Newbury’s show, where her white male counterparts receive her with a collective groan.
Though her cupcake-wielding character is “way more naïve than I ever was,” says Kaling, who got her first taste of comedy as a “Conan” intern at age 17, she identifies strongly with both Molly and Katherine.
“I remember vividly what it’s like to be the only woman, the only person of color in the writer’s room, like it was yesterday. But it was actually 15 years ago. And now I really relate to Emma’s character more, being an employer, having a job for a long time, feeling impatient, feeling a little complacent about it.”
But back in her early “Office” days, Kaling labored under the condition of her hiring.
Being the diversity hire at “The Office” “meant that NBC paid for my salary, it didn’t come out of the (show’s) budget,” she says. “And I remember being acutely aware of that and embarrassed by it, frankly.
“If one of the other writers who is white and male has a bad day or off day or isn’t as funny as they should be, you don’t think that’s a reflection of all white men,” she says. But “I had this huge fear of, ‘God, I’m representing so many millions of people here by my sheer presence, and if I do not do well, it’s a reflection on my race and my gender.’ ”
Director Nisha Ganatra – who coincidentally met Kaling as a diversity hire helming an episode of “The Mindy Project” – says she and Kaling “always sort of joke that the movie is an ode to hard work.”
“She doesn’t settle for good enough,” Ganatra says, noting how groundbreaking “Late Night” is, even behind the scenes. “There’s an Indian American writer and an Indian American director and we both work in the space of comedy. Sadly, it’s kind of radical to make a film together.”
Today, Kaling is in high demand; she’s writing a coming-of-age show for Netflix about a teenage Indian American girl, and her 10-episode reboot of “Four Weddings and A Funeral” hits Hulu on July 31.
Her writers’ rooms are “collaborative” and multicultural. Rather than relying on diversity programs to find talent, Kaling says, she tends to hire female assistants with dreams of becoming writers, mentoring them and promoting them.
At home, she’s a single mom to her almost-18-month-old daughter, Katherine, who just happens to share a name with Thompson’s character. “The character came before the child. I just loved the name,” she laughs.
Though Kaling has never revealed who her child’s father is, she does open up about deciding to become a mom. “I wasn’t ready. I don’t think anyone is ever ready. I definitely knew I wanted kids, but the decision, it was not something that I had, like, planned.”
Mornings with Katherine start with a sweet dose of swing time in the backyard. “We have such a small family, it’s just the two of us, but I take her with me everywhere whenever I travel,” she says.
As someone who says she didn’t see herself as maternal, “I have been really surprised by how much I crave time with her. Just that there was a side of me that could really enjoy being around the baby.”
And they’re two peas in a pod. “It helps that she was, like, identical to me,” she smiles. “And is really funny.”