168
Once, while Mindy Kaling was filming season
five of her television series The Mindy Project,
she had to walk from the writers’ room to the
set. On the show, Kaling played a young doc-
tor who reveled in high fashion. The set was
across the lot at Universal Studios, and so, clad
in her couture costume, she click-clacked in
stilettos over the pavement to film. Suddenly,
she heard a menacing bellow. “The security
guard screamed from across the lot, ‘Where
do you think you’re going? This is a set!’”
Kaling pointed up to the gigantic billboard for
the show, which featured her smiling visage.
“I know,” she recalls telling the misguided
guard. “I’m the star.”
Kaling, 40, is used to being treated like
she doesn’t belong. When she was hired as a
writer on NBC’s The Office at just 24, she was
the only woman and the only person of color
in the writers’ room. With The Mindy Project,
which ran for six seasons, she became the first
woman of color to create, write, and star in a
prime-time sitcom. After years of feeling like
a conspicuous outsider in Hollywood, Kaling
has embraced her status as a trailblazer—and
it’s led to her funniest, most honest work yet.
This year alone, she wrote, costarred in,
and coproduced the Sundance darling Late
Night, which mined her experiences as a
young woman of color writing for TV; cocreat-
ed, cowrote, and co–executive produced a re-
imagining of the ’90s rom-com Four Weddings
and a Funeral, centered on a black woman and
a British Pakistani man (released as a Hulu
limited series); and cocreated, wrote, and co–
executive produced a forthcoming Netflix se-
ries about a first-generation Indian American
high schooler. The latter, Never Have I Ever,
follows 15-year-old Devi, who desperately
wants to lose her virginity and shed her reputa-
tion as an “unfuckable nerd.” In some ways, the
story is not unlike Kaling’s experience growing
up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she
spent her high school days “staring longingly
at boys who would never look at me and hav-
ing, like, pornographic thoughts about them.”
In all three projects, she tackles race and
gender more than ever before. Of Never Have
I Ever (named for a drinking game where
participants slowly reveal “stuff ” they’ve
done), Kaling says that “we are programmed
to see Asian girls in a certain way on teen
shows”—often as nerds with overbearing par-
ents. While examples of white teens behaving
badly abound in pop culture—think Superbad
or Booksmart—we don’t see it as often for In-
dian girls or black girls or Asian girls. For Ka-
ling, though, playing “Never Have I Ever” as a
teen wasn’t as wild as Devi’s version would be:
“It’s really boring when you’ve done literally
nothing,” she says, laughing.
Kaling has long faced criticism for the lack
of diversity on her shows. On The Mindy Proj-
ect, her character dated white men almost ex-
clusively. Critics pounced on an exchange in a
season two episode where Kaling’s character
gives her ID to an officer and says, “Okay, I
know that my ID says I’m 5'10" with blond hair,
110 pounds with crystal-blue eyes. My philoso-
phy is that an ID should be aspirational.” Early
in her career, she says, that criticism grated
on her. “It used to frustrate me a lot that I felt
way more scrutinized by women and wom-
en of color than white showrunners were on
shows with all-white casts,” Kaling says. “I just
wanted to be a writer. I didn’t necessarily look
at it as being like, ‘Well, you also have to be a
spokesperson.’ That’s not what I signed up for.”
What changed, she says, is realizing just
how much of a role model she is. When she’s
at the airport or at CVS, young women of color
come up to her “incredibly shyly and politely,
often trembling, telling me how much it means
to them and to their family to see someone
like me making it.” Or they’ll tell her that their
parents were nervous about them pursuing
a career in TV or film until they saw Kaling’s
success. “When I see that real physical reactionA TRIPLE-THREAT OUTSIDER,
WRITER-ACTOR-CREATOR
MINDY KALING, HAS EARNED HER
PLACE AT THE TABLE—NO
MORE EMMY ESSAYS REQUIRED.
BY REBECCA NELSON.
STYLED BY SHIONA TURINI.MINDY KALING
they have to seeing me, and how special it is
to them that I’m making it, it becomes more
important to me.”
She’s now also a role model to her daugh-
ter, Katherine, who will be two next month,
and becoming a single mom (Kaling has not
publicly disclosed the father) has changed
the stories she wants to tell. Take Late Night,
which focuses on a venerable comic who
begrudgingly hires Molly, played by Kaling,
as a “diversity hire.” Though the otherwise
all-white, all-male writing staff meets Molly’s
entrée with disdain, she persists in proving
her worth. “That experience is so universal,”
she says, “for so many women who are trying
to do something that they were not trained
to do and who have ambition and who don’t
see people who look like them succeeding.” It
was exactly the kind of story she wanted her
daughter to watch one day.
Like Molly, Kaling has faced her share of
sexism in television. Early on in her tenure
at The Office, the show was nominated for an
Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. Short-
ly after, the Television Academy, which puts
on the awards show, told Kaling that because
there were too many producers on The Office,
they were going to cut her from the list. She,
the only woman of color on the team, wouldn’t
be eligible for an Emmy like the rest of the staff.
In order to receive her rightful recognition, she
recalls, “they made me, not any of the other
producers, fill out a whole form and write an
essay about all my contributions as a writer
and a producer. I had to get letters from all the
other male, white producers saying that I had
contributed, when my actual record stood for
itself.” Her name was included in the final list,
though the show ultimately didn’t win.
Fighting to prove they deserve their place
is something to which all women—particular-
ly women of color—can relate. There’s a quote
from Toni Morrison that resonates with Ka-
ling: “In this country, American means white.
Everybody else has to hyphenate.” Regardless
of how successful she is, Kaling feels she will
always deal with some amount of racism
and sexism. “It really doesn’t matter how
much money I have,” she says. “I’m treated
badly with enough regularity that it keeps
me humble.”
It could be disheartening, but she tells me
she instead chooses to find the humor in it. “I
am grateful, because I do think it keeps me feel-
ing like an outsider, which is helpful as a writer.”
Even when her face is on the billboard. ▪