My new ‘Four Weddings’ will be less white
As she stars in ‘Ocean’s 8’, US comedy queen Mindy Kaling tells Anita Singh why she’s remaking the Hugh Grant classic
Mindy Kaling went to the Met Gala this year, the absurdly glamorous New York costume bash where Rihanna dressed as the Pope and Frances Mcdormand dressed as a tree. Kaling looked gorgeous in a custommade gold crown. There was only one problem. “It added another eight inches to my head and I got caught in the car door and was like, this is not a good look.”
It is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to happen to Kaling. A comedy queen in America, the 38-year-old has won millions of fans thanks to The Mindy Project, a TV series about the comic adventures of a romance-obsessed doctor, a role in the US version of The Office and two bestselling books, in which she poked fun at her celebrity self.
The fact she was at the Met Gala, of course, tells you Kaling is a serious player. A writer, producer and actor, she has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, and counts both Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey as fans. And this week, she stars in one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters, Ocean’s 8, an all-female crime caper co-starring Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett and Anne Hathaway that picks up where the old trilogy left off.
No wonder she has joked: “I literally have the best life in the world besides that hot lawyer who married George Clooney.”
If there was anyone left in Hollywood who doubted that women can sell a movie, they can now zip it: Ocean’s 8 topped the US box office in its first weekend, with better numbers than the previous three Ocean’s films. It turns out that audiences like watching female characters with something interesting to say and do. Who knew? As Kaling puts it: “It’s fantastic that in our scenes together, we’re talking about the viability of a heist rather than who we have crushes on.”
The film also has a Met Gala connection – the heist the gang tries to pull off involves stealing a $150 million necklace from a highly strung A-lister (Hathaway) on fashion’s biggest night. Kaling plays Amita, a jeweller hired for her expertise with diamonds.
Fans have suggested that Ocean’s 8 is a lesbian film in disguise. This is news to Kaling but she sounds delighted. “Really? I love this theory!” she squeals. “If anyone is underrepresented in mainstream films, it’s lesbians. If that’s what it’s being held as, an anthem for lesbian women, I am so for it.”
The film has also avoided the vitriol that greeted 2016’s female Ghostbusters reboot, panned by male fans of the original. (The trailer received one million “down votes” on Youtube, and one male critic refused to watch it because “if you already know you’re going to hate it, why give them your money?”).
“The Ocean’s franchise just wasn’t connected to people’s sense of identity from childhood the way that Ghostbusters was,” Kaling reasons. “But if your entire identity is wrapped up in the legacy of a movie franchise, you have bigger problems…” She then adds: “Maybe because I’m an Indian woman, but it just seems a very interesting example of white privilege to feel so enamoured of a movie that you can’t imagine it being remade with anything slightly different.”
Kaling’s Indian parents, a doctor and an architect, moved to the US before she was born and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They fostered her love of comedy, introducing her to Fawlty Towers and Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and after studying at Dartmouth College, she began doing stand-up. She was talent-spotted by the creator of the US version of The Office, who hired her as a staff writer when she was 24. After eight years behind and in front of the camera, she started The Mindy Project.
Running her own show put her in a select group with the likes of Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, and she is all the rarer for being a woman of colour. Kaling makes no secret of how hard she worked to get there, or the ambition and self-belief that drove her.
“Even as a kid I thought, ‘Well, I am different, but people in Hollywood keep saying all they want is something fresh and new, and don’t I technically count as that?’”
Did it bother her, growing up, that the most popular comedy shows – Friends, Sex and the City – were so white? “Oh, completely. One of the big things about being a fan of comedy and my age is that you love something so much even though it doesn’t love you back at all. It makes you think, ‘OK, our love of things is not necessarily defined by how much we’re represented in it’.
“But can you imagine how much more you would love it if you actually were? And that’s one of the exciting things about now. I think it would be considered a hostile act now to make a show where it wasn’t at least 30 per cent non-traditionally white casting.”
Which brings us to Kaling’s next project, one that promises to make her a much bigger name over here: a TV series adaptation of Four Weddings and a Funeral, backed by its original writer, Richard Curtis.
The Curtis universe is notoriously white, and Kaling is adjusting that. Where the original gave us the bumbling toff Hugh Grant, the new version will have a British-pakistani male lead, and an African-american actress in place of Andie Mcdowell. The characters and plot lines will be different, Kaling says, but the “spirit” will be the same.
“I don’t know if you’d call it a remake, I don’t know if it’s even a re-imagining, I haven’t thought of the right term yet,” muses Kaling, an unabashed fan of romantic comedies. “What I’m excited about with this version is how inclusive the cast looks. We wrote parts that were distinctly British but not ‘traditionally British’ in the way that we have seen in movies Stateside – not necessarily only white.” Before that she is making a comedy, Late Night, with Emma Thompson.
Kaling’s conversation moves effortlessly between the jokey and the serious, from people of Indian heritage visiting Michelin-starred Indian restaurants (“You’re like, wait, show me the secret entrance where we can get a cheaper version of this!”) to the downfall of her comedy idols, Bill Cosby, Louis CK and, to some extent, Woody Allen: “It’s an incredibly frustrating time when you love The Cosby Show and Hannah and Her Sisters and Louis CK’S specials… you now feel everything has been tarnished. I was raised watching The Cosby Show and now I feel this urge to have to erase the fact I used to watch and love it.”
In December she gave birth to a daughter, Katherine. She chats about new motherhood and her sadness that her own mother, Swati, who died in 2012, is not here to share the joy.
Although open about other aspects of her life, Kaling has kept the identity of the baby’s father secret (she has written about her “soulmate”, The Office colleague BJ Novak, and fans hope it is him). “She didn’t ask to be born, so I want to protect her privacy,” she says.
Does she use the term “single mother” to describe herself?
“Oh, I definitely identify as a single mother,” she replies. “I mean, it’s not like I’m thinking about it 24/7, but that label is true.”
Maybe it’s not how we would expect the rom-com version of Kaling’s life to work out, but she is doing things her way. As she says of her Four Weddings project: “Remaking it didn’t seem so appealing to me because I think the original is so wonderful. And then I thought, ‘What would this be through my eyes?’ And I just did that.”
‘A big thing about being a fan of comedy is that you love something even though it doesn’t love you back’
Ocean’s 8 is released in cinemas on Monday