Mindy Kaling, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter‘s Awards Chatter podcast — which was recorded Thursday in front of an audience at the Newport Beach TV Fest, where Kaling was honored with the fest’s Artist of Distinction Award —is a prolific writer, director, producer and actress who has proven to be one of the most gifted and influential creative voices of her generation.
The 46-year-old first came to prominence as a writer and supporting actress —she played perky customer service rep Kelly Kapoor — on NBC’s The Office from 2005-2012. She was just 24 and the only woman in the writer’s room when she started, ultimately penned more episodes of the show than any other writer and, in 2010, became the first woman of color to be nominated for an Emmy in any writing category.
She subsequently created and starred in her own show, The Mindy Project, which ran on Fox from 2012 through 2015 and then Hulu from 2015 through 2017. She was the first woman of color to create, write and star in her own network show, and the show was the first network TV series to have an Indian-American lead character.
She later co-created Netflix’s Never Have I Ever (2020-2023) and HBO Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021-2025), and created Hulu’s Not Suitable for Work (it dropped last week and is currently the most-watched show on the platform), which she did not act in, and which she describes as a semi-autobiographical trilogy; and co-created Netflix’s Running Point (2025-), a show about the female owner of a professional basketball team (Kate Hudson), the second season of which is now generating Emmys buzz.
Kaling has been described by Marie Claire as “the defining voice of first-generation Asian Americans” and by The Guardian as one of the most powerful women in TV.” She’s also a New York Times bestselling author who was named of TIME’s 100 most influential people in the world, was honored with the Producers Guild of America’s Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television and was presented, by former President Joe Biden, with the National Medal of Arts.
Below are some highlights of Kaling’s Awards Chatter interview at Napa Valley TV Fest.
The things she’s proudest of
“The things I’m the most proud about in my career have been things that sound so strange and the most people have told me, ‘Don’t do it, I don’t get it!’ One of them is playing Ben Affleck in Matt & Ben off off Broadway in New York [in 2002]. You cannot imagine how many people told me this was a waste of time. … The other is, I did the show called Never Have I Ever, and I had the idea of having John McEnroe be the narrator for the show because he had a temper and so did the young Indian-American lead, who’s 15. I think those are the things I’m the most proud of.”
Her “worst experience” turns out to be “the best thing that ever happened to me”
“I’ve had some bad experiences in Hollywood, but this was the worst experience. … They [The WB] loved the idea of a show based on our friendship [her and Brenda Withers, her college friend with whom she co-wrote Matt & Ben], but they didn’t want us to play the leads. So we had to write the show, and then we had to audition against other, much better-looking actors than us, for our show. Then, we didn’t get cast, so we had to produce a pilot for the show with two very beautiful and very talented actresses, and that didn’t go. But that show not going — that pilot not getting picked up — was the best thing that ever happened to me, because I wouldn’t have been able to write on The Office if it had.”
Why she began playing Kelly Kapoor on The Office
“When I was hired at The Office as a writer, I was happy doing that. Of course, there was a part of me, looking at John Krasinski and B.J. [Novak], who was a writer/performer, thinking like, ‘Oh, that would be cool!’ I was hired as a writer —but there was a clause in my contract that I could be used as a performer. Honestly, I didn’t even know about that clause, and my agent at the time didn’t tell me about it. But the great thing about The Office was that … because it was a mockumentary, and it was based on the iconic and incredible British Office, everyone needed to look very normal. I was like, ‘I definitely look normal!’ We were working on the first season, and it was the second episode. My friend B.J. had written this episode called ‘Diversity Day,’ where Michael had to be offending people, and it just wasn’t as funny if the room was white; it needed to be that there were some minorities in there who were very offended. And in that instance, Greg [Daniels, the showrunner] was like, ‘Well, could you just be on camera and be one of the people in the office?’ And if it had been any other show, I don’t know that NBC would’ve approved it, but on this show, where we look like people you might actually know, they were like, ‘Yeah, she can do it.’ And so, I got Taft-Hartley’d, and I got to be Kelly in that second episode [famously smacking Michael].”
“A gift from my mom” on the day she died
“One of the strangest days of my life, to this day, is when [Fox TV chief] Kevin Reilly called me to tell me that my show [The Mindy Project] got picked up. It was the day my mother passed away, and he called me when I was at the hospital. It was such a gift. For anyone who’s had anyone in their immediate family pass away, the gift was not just professional, but to be able to think about something else. To be able to help my dad with all the stuff that you have to do after someone passes away, but then also be able to be like, ‘OK, I’ve got to hire a cinematographer’ and ‘Who’s a director who could do this?’ [choking up] I truly, to this day, think that was like a gift from my mom, and helped me through that time, because we were so close.”
On the significance of The Mindy Project
“I’ve lost a lot of weight since then, but, at that time, I was a size 10 or 12, dark-skinned Indian woman as a lead in a romantic comedy show. … I went into that show with the skills I had learned from The Office, but I got to finally do the thing I want to do, which is romantic comedy. And I got to do the other thing I wanted to do, which is have more than two lines an episode.”
Serving — and being scrutinized— by the Indian-American community
“My community is so starved for any kind of representation, so there’s a lot of pressure on that. If you show a certain kind of Indian person and they have different traditions than the kind of Indian person that those people knew and grew up with, that feels disappointing. So I’ve had to deal with that for 20 years of my career, and I can’t say that it’s easy, but I will say that that same group of people who are scrutinizing me the most are also the ones that ride for me the most. And so getting it right, particularly for the people in my community, is a thing that it is really important to me. But I get mad at them — I feel like they’re my family, where I get pissed at them too, and I wish they had some sense, or more of a sense, of what it’s taken to make it this far. I do think there’s some things that I have been scrutinized with that my fellow creators of shows don’t necessarily have to deal with.”
The inspiration for Not Suitable for Work
“From the start of The Mindy Project [which she made throughout her 30s], I was so consumed by it — I was going to set 6 a.m., wrapping at 10 p.m., coming home —that I don’t have a lot of memories. I’ll see memes or photos and it’ll jog memories that I’ve completely forgotten. The time in my life that’s most vivid is when I was not successful, but just had big dreams, and I had no access to anything, and I would go to bed every night worried that it was never going to happen. I wanted to fast-forward to now, the time in my life when I was successful and everyone thought I was cool and smart and had something to say. I would go to bed at night in Brooklyn, in our railroad apartment, thinking, ‘Is this ever going to happen? Why is life so slow?’ And [so, recently] I wanted to do a show about that time. I see a lot of shows on TV about twentysomethings who are slackers and they’re lying all over each other and they don’t have a lot of career ambitions, but that is not the case for the Gen Z people I know that work on my shows. There’s this characterization that there’s a generation of ‘screenagers’ who just want to cancel people online and not go to work, and I have not found that to be the case, so I wanted to do a show about that.”
On writing herself into a corner on Running Point
“Netflix has a lot of shows in development, and they want a hit, they want a lot of people to watch their shows —it’s a business. So, at the end of every season, we try to [write ourselves into a corner] — and by the way, they taught us this, because they’re rooting for us as well and they want the show to go on, but they’re like, ‘Try to make as many cliffhangers [as you can].’ You know when you’re watching a Netflix show, and it’s coming to an end, and some crazy shit happens, and you’re like, ‘Well, now I have to watch the next one’? That’s on purpose — it’s a sales tool to keep you hooked in. And so, we have done that — but, by the way, we learned that on Never Have I Ever [another Netflix show]. When we started doing that, we were like, ‘Oh, we can’t just tie everything up neatly at the end of the episode, they’ll switch channels, they’ll be on HBO Max in two seconds, so we’ve got to hook them in with a crazy cliffhanger at the end of an episode.’”