THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER 55 AUGUST 21, 2019
Watch Singh open up about disrupting the late night talk show format at THR.COM/VIDEOOBAMA: @LILLY/TWITTER. BOOK: COURTESY OF PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE. BARRIS: TOMMASO BODDI/WIREIMAGE. FEIG: STUART C. WILSON/GETTY IM
AGES. PEWDIEPIE: MATT WINKELMEYER/
GETTY IMAGES. PAUL: FRAZER HARRISON/GETTY IMAGES. SINGH: JIM SPELLMAN/WIREIMAGE. NEISTAT: DAVID LIVINGSTON/GETTY IMAGES. BALLINGER: EMMA MCINTYRE/GETTY IMAGES.Casey Neistat 11M 2.6Bbehind and a subscriber back-
slide would begin, she barely let
herself take a vacation. She was
preaching balance and self-love
to her fans, yet she’d stopped her
own therapy, given up journal-
ing and was barely reaching out
to friends.
Then, on Nov. 12, she posted
one of her most raw, vulnerable
videos yet. In “I’ll see you soon ...”
— which quickly racked up more
than 2 million views, though
that was hardly the goal — Singh
revealed that she’d be taking an
indefinite break from YouTube.
“I’m going to be real with you all, I
am mentally, physically, emotion-
ally and spiritually exhausted,”
she told fans, adding that, lately,
“I haven’t been super happy with a
lot of the content I’ve created.”
Indefinite, however, is a
squishy time frame. Within a
month, Singh was back. During
that downtime, she found a
therapist, adopted meditation
and called her friends. Singh also
had been grappling less publicly
with the decision to come out as
bisexual. “It’s not that I had this
big secret,” she explains, shifting
in her seat and scanning the liv-
ing room for Scarbro, who is too
busy chewing on a stuffed uni-
corn in the corner to offer much
support. “Because of the culture
I was raised in, I never actually
allowed myself to figure things
out. Moving to L.A., I was exposed
to so many different types of
people, and I think that probably
opened up my horizons.”
She gave herself a deadline, her
30th birthday, to come out to her
family and friends, but it took
another five months before she
would share the news with her
fans, via a casual tweet identify-
ing herself as “female, coloured
and bisexual.” She’s now trying
out dating apps (“They’re scary”)
but says fans shouldn’t expect to
hear much about her romantic
partners: “I’ve signed up for this
life, but not everyone has.”
Singh had been warned that
her business might take a hit,
especially in more conservative
countries where she’d developed
a fan base, but aside from some
Twitter vitriol, the reaction was
largely positive. “The very next
meet-and-greet that I did after
coming out was in India, and ISUPERWOMAN
TO SU P E R B RAN DPUBLISHING
How to Be
a Bawse, a
hybrid memoir
and self-help
guide, has sold
85,000 copies
in the U.S. since
2017, per the
NPD Group.FILM AND TV
“We can give a platform to people
who might not have one,” says
head of development Polly Auritt
of Unicorn Island Productions,
which has 20 projects lined up
with partners like Kenya Barris
(left) and Paul Feig.hearing her say, ‘I’m going to
meet The Rock one day.’ And the
next thing you know, not only are
we at a movie premiere with him
but he’s mentoring her.”
Still, there came a moment, just
last year, when Singh realized
that her vision board needed an
overhaul. Although her career was
going exactly as planned — she
was making strides as an actress,
having completed a turn as a
vlogger in HBO’s Fahrenheit 451
adaptation, and had set up a shin-
gle, Unicorn Island Productions,
to develop her own slate of cre-
ative vehicles — she was totally,
utterly miserable.“I CAME HOME ONE DAY AND I
remember lying on my kitchen
floor and just crying,” Singh
confides over glasses of orange
slice-infused water at the
Hollywood condo she purchased
in 2016 (she’s decorated it in
aggressively happy colors, with
lemon-yellow walls in the living
room and raspberry-pink in the
bedroom) and where she lives
with her now-full-grown poodle
mix, Scarbro, named for the town
where Singh was raised. “I turned
into such a machine. I was feeling
that I was completely losing what
it means to be human.”
After eight years of perfecting
the business of YouTube, she’d
let it consume her. At the height
of her output, she was producing
as many as nine videos a week,
not to mention dozens of tweets,
Instagram posts and other social
missives. Afraid that if she took
a day off the YouTube recommen-
dation algorithm would leave herwould say 50 percent of people
in that line came out to me,” she
says. “To me, that is success.”LAST SUMMER, WHILE SINGH
was preparing to focus more on
herself, executives at NBC also
had begun to focus in on her as
they worked out a plan with Daly
to turn the lights out on Last Call,
which by that point had been
boiled down to a potpourri of
prepackaged segments.
NBC could have stopped
programming the time slot (no
other broadcast network airs
a third late night show) but
executives saw an opportunity
to experiment and create what
NBC Entertainment co-president
George Cheeks calls “a creative
playground.” They put out a call
for talent, and John Irwin, who
has been producing specials for
NBC since working on Late Night
With Conan O’Brien in the 1990s,
suggested they take a look at
Singh; he’d been impressed by her
ability to switch between wacky
sketches and serious inter-
views with the likes of Obama,
Bill Gates and Charlize Theron.
“That’s the hardest part of the
job, being able to sit down with a
guest and make it feel natural and
comfortable,” says Irwin.
Singh was already familiar to
NBC from a shelved pilot by Black-
ish creator Kenya Barris (Bright
Futures, about a bunch of awk-
ward 20-somethings). So Irwin
placed a call to her agents at WME
to feel out if she’d be interested
in the gig, then flew to 30 Rock,
where the only other name
executives had been seriously
considering was onetime swim-
suit model (and current cookbook
author) Chrissy Teigen, who had
already passed.
From NBC’s point of view, hir-
ing someone with Singh’s digital
savvy made sense. Not only could
she bring a much-needed dose
of diversity to the heavily white,
entirely male broadcast late
night landscape, she also could
potentially connect with young
audiences that increasingly are
abandoning broadcast for YouTube
and Netflix. Besides, much of the
battle over late night dominance
has shifted from morning-after
Nielsen ratings to share of the
next day’s social media buzz. WhoHOW SI NGH ’ S YOUTU B E STACKS U P
While she has fewer subscribers than big names like
PewDiePie, she generates a healthy number of viewsPewDiePieLogan Paul VlogsSubscribers Views22.8B4.6B0050 100M 10 20 30B20M99MSingh’s most-
popular video is
a collaboration
with Liza Koshy
that racked up
32 million views.Source: YouTubeIISuperwomanII 15M 3.1BPHILANTHROPY
Singh has hired someone to run
her #GirlLove campaign to sup-
port women’s education, which
fundraises and boosts awareness
through interviews with luminar-
ies like Michelle Obama.Miranda Sings 11M 2.1B