Mindy Kaling on why she uses her fame and fortune to break barriers for Indians on the global stage

When Mindy Kaling signs on to our Zoom chat from her home in Los Angeles, she’s sitting on her bed in a bright sun-filled bedroom. I’m disarmed by how comfortable I feel with her, how familiar she seems, our set-up not so different from my weekly Zoom chats with my college roommates. 

I congratulate Kaling—for the birth of her second child (her son Spencer was born this September), for the release of her new book (Nothing Like I Imagined is her third book of intimate observations), for the announcement of her new film with actor Priyanka Chopra Jonas (as yet untitled), for the screenplay of Legally Blonde 3 (Reese Witherspoon reportedly recruited her to write the sequel), and then I stop myself because I want to hear her speak, not just congratulate her for an hour. As I’m writing this, I see a tweet pop up from bestselling author Jennifer Weiner announcing that Kaling is going to star in and produce an adaptation of her novel Good in Bed. Did she sign a big contract while also somehow focusing on our chat? 

Sure, Kaling works hard but, as she says, since her work is something she loves, she hardly feels like she’s working. “You know, it’s so trite, but I love my job so much. I feel so lucky that it’s so easy to do all the time.” To those of us watching, it feels like Kaling has more than 24 hours in a day and in a way she does—she says she sleeps just five or six hours a night.

HOME AND THE WORLD 

For someone so restless, how has she been coping with the pandemic and isolation? I ask. 

“Not great,” she answers. “I’m very hard-working, but I’m also very social. It was a lot of growing pains at the beginning of the pandemic. It made it easier that my daughter was here because she’s so fun and funny. In the beginning, it was a lot of just us staring at each other, but I got to know her better.” 

Kaling’s father and stepmother live nearby, in West Hollywood, and before the pandemic, her father used to see Katherine, Kaling’s daughter, every single day. When the lockdowns were announced, he didn’t come into the house for three months, but, “Every day he would drive by and wear a mask and gloves and talk to Katherine through the car window.” 

Now everyone in the Kaling house gets tested weekly and, like the rest of us, she’s figuring her way through the new normal. She invites her writers out on socially distanced walks around the neighbourhood. “I love my house, but it feels so small to me now. Doing everything, like writing in my bedroom and also sleeping there, and exercising—the house feels much smaller.” 

SOMEONE LIKE YOU 

When we speak, just a few weeks ahead of the historic American election of 2020, Kaling is wearing a black sweatshirt by Phenomenal Woman + Meena Harris that has a picture of Kamala Harris on it and says ‘Vote for Aunty’. Today, the United States of America has a half-Indian half-Jamaican female vice president-elect. It is a time of many firsts. “I understand now what representation means,” Kaling says about Harris. “To see her up there, to see someone who looks like her.” 

I remind her that she also did that for many of us when The Office came out in 2005. Kelly Kapoor was chatty, funny, self-deprecating, boy-obsessed, diet-obsessed, and Indian. But in no particular order. 

“Did I?” she asks, genuinely uncertain. Kaling was the first Indian American to have her own network show. She made being Indian in American popular culture matter of fact. We could be Indian for an international audience in all our messy glory and exist as individuals instead of being given the impossible burden of being ambassadors of over a billion diverse people. We all remember that Diwali episode in which Kapoor barely knows the origins of the festival but is excited to celebrate it. 

Not everyone was thrilled about that, of course, and Kaling, who really listens to the audience and critics, says “It’s hard because it has to mean so much to so many people. The Mindy Project wasn’t ethnicity-driven. For a lot of white executives at the TV networks, they kind of wanted it to be. They felt more comfortable with it being about an Indian woman who felt out of place in America educating white people. And it’s not that I haven’t felt out of place in America as a dark-skinned Indian woman, but it was not the most interesting thing, coming from The Office. Had I had different training it might have been. I love those kinds of stories, and I think there should be more of them, and I might even do a show like that, but I do think people are surprised and put off that I didn’t embrace those kinds of stories early on in my career.”

Kaling continues to help break down the barriers of entry for Indian voices to the global stage. When casting for her Netflix show Never Have I Ever, Kaling and co-producer Lang Fisher put out an open casting call for the lead roles. Over 15,000 South Asian actors sent in informally produced home auditions. 

Half-Bengali and half-Tamilian, Kaling’s only been to India twice—once when she was a baby and once when she was 14. “I don’t really know what my impact has been in India,” she says as she gears up to shoot in the country with Chopra Jonas, another global Indian powerhouse, next year. 

FAMILY TIES 

Her parents met in Lagos, Nigeria, in their twenties, when her father was working as an architect at the hospital in which her mother was an OB-GYN. 

Kaling is famously family-oriented, and she certainly seems to have taken to parenting effortlessly. Being such a public figure and having a pregnancy in complete secrecy isn’t an easy task. She confesses that the pandemic and being at home, away from the media glare, made things easier. 

I ask her if motherhood was something she always wanted to do. She thinks and then says, “Yes, definitely.” 

“The best relationship I had in my life was the one with my mom. It was so pure and so fun and uncomplicated, and I hope that I can have that with my son or daughter—if I’m lucky, with at least one of my kids—when they get older.” 

Read the complete interview in Vogue India’s December 2020 issue that hit stands soon. Subscribe here

Photographed by Mike Rosenthal. Styled by Ria Kamat 

On Mindy: Dress, Dolce & Gabbana. 'Juste un Clou' earrings, 'Love' gold ring; both Cartier

Hair: Patricia Morales/The Visionaries. Makeup: Carola Gonzalez/Foward Artists. Nails: Thuy Nguyen/A Frame. Photographer’s assistants: Thomas Patton; Morgan Demeter; Joe Beckley. Assistant stylist: Devyn Holbrook. Photographer’s agency: Day Reps. Bookings editor: Prachiti Parakh. Digital tech: Chris Nowling. Seamstress: Sivorn Price