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 doctor 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 primetime sitcom. After years of feeling like a conspicuous outsider in Hollywood, Kaling has embraced her trailblazer status—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; cocreated, 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 series 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 reputation 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 having, 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 parents. While examples of white teens behaving badly abound in pop culture—think Superbad or Booksmart—we don’t see it as often for Indian girls or black girls or Asian girls. For Kaling, 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 Project, her character dated white men almost exclusively. 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 philosophy 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 women 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 reaction 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 daughter, 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. Shortly 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—particularly women of color—can relate. There’s a quote from Toni Morrison that resonates with Kaling: “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 feeling like an outsider, which is helpful as a writer.” Even when her face is on the billboard.
Styled by Shiona Turini. Hair by Marc Mena for Leonor Greyl Paris; makeup by Janice Kinjo for Dior. Manicure by Thuy Nguyen at SWA; prop styling by Ali Gallagher at Jones Management; produced by Michelle Hynek at Crawford & Co Productions.
This article appears in the November 2019 issue of ELLE, on newsstands October 22.
