Mindy Kaling scored one of the biggest deals out of Sundance this year for “Late Night,” a comedy about a veteran late-night host who hires her first female writer under pressure to make her all-male, all-white writers room more diverse. The well-received pic is inspired by screenwriter and star Kaling’s own experiences on “The Office.” In a candid interview with Deadline, the “Mindy Project” creator and star and best-selling writer acknowledged that her early days as the first woman and first person of color to join the writing staff on the beloved sitcom were “terrifying.” She was a diversity hire — and that used to “really embarrass” her.
“I thought I had the scarlet letter on me,” Kaling explained. “‘Diversity hire’ inherently meant, ‘less talented but fulfilling that quota.’” Since then, she’s realized that the entertainment industry isn’t quite the meritocracy she believed it to be. “If you don’t know the right people to get into the rooms, you will just never be seen,” she learned. “I love talking about it in the movie because it’s really real, and the stigma’s really real, and it truly is a helpful thing. It helped me personally.”
The “Ocean’s 8” actress also spoke about the significance of Emma Thompson co-starring in “Late Night.” “I’ve been amazed at the number of roles that are being created in TV — much more than film — for women over the age of 45-50 years old,” she observed. “The problem is that they’re largely in drama. So if you are an actress and you can play a widow, or your son died in a war, there are these very wordy juicy parts in drama, but for comedy it’s like, ‘Good luck.’” “[Emma’s] comedy is like you could time it to a metronome; it’s just so quick and so funny.” She added, “It’s those kinds of roles I don’t get to see women perform. I just wanted to see her in a role like that, so I felt like I just would have to write it if I wanted to see it.”
Kaling acknowledged that she’s under more pressure to tell inclusive stories than her white male contemporaries. “I think there is a different standard for me as a show creator, as someone to provide employment, than there is for someone in a lot of these other TV shows that you see with predominantly white casts and with white writing staff,” she said. “They don’t get the scrutiny, and it used to frustrate me a lot when I was younger because I was the first Indian-American woman to have my own show in the States, and I was the first woman of color to get nominated for an Emmy in writing.”
Kaling said that that the expectation for her to do better than everyone, “including white male writers who’ve been doing this for 20, even 30 years longer than [she]” frustrated her when she was younger. “I would not be held up to the same scrutiny as some of these other people who frankly had more resources than me to make a bigger difference,” she recalled. Now, she feels that this response was indicative of a “kind of an immaturity” on her part. “Especially during these new shows, I realized that the only way that people will have these kinds of opportunities — there’s literally been so little change for women of color — is if people like me make a difference. So it’s just the fact of the matter. We have to be the ones to open the doors for other people,” she explained.
Now, Kaling wants to make sure that all of her projects support “other people … who look like me, who don’t have back-up. That’s my responsibility,” she said. “I became used to the fact that there will never be the same scrutiny on successful white male showrunners, there just will never. They will never be on a panel where they are asked those same questions, and I’m kind of OK with it now.”
Head over to the Deadline to see why Kaling feels that adding director to her CV may be a “morally … good thing to do” and her warning against preaching wokeness to audiences.
“Late Night” hits theaters June 7. Kaling’s other upcoming projects include a semi-autobiographical Netflix series inspired by her teen years and a Hulu anthology series based on “Four Weddings and a Funeral.”
