Illustration by Andy Bunday
People think they know Mindy Kaling. The 36-year-old made her name on Greg Daniels’s US version of The Office, which ran from 2005 to 2013, playing the singularly vacuous Kelly Kapoor. Behind the scenes, she wrote more than two dozen episodes of the workplace mockumentary – more than any other writer – also directing two episodes.
She is now creator and executive producer of the upcoming Disney Plus comedy Not Suitable For Work, released on 2 June. Starring Ella Hunt, Avantika, Will Angus, Jack Martin and Nicholas Duvernay, it’s about five twentysomething professionals living and striving in the glossy Manhattan locale Murray Hill.
A TV series synopsis suggesting Friends revisited, but with less life-work balance, feels fitting for Kaling. The American-Indian actor-screenwriter-director-producer is renowned as a hard-grafting, high-achieving Hollywood multihyphenate, whose myriad plaudits include six Emmy nominations.
Henry Wong, the culture editor of Esquire magazine, tells me: “Mindy Kaling is cutting that Reese Witherspoon route of making and producing her own shows. The difference is, she can also write.”
She wrote the 2011 New York Times bestseller Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? Her TV series include The Mindy Project, Never Have I Ever about high schoolers (an estimated 40m households watched the first series), and the sports comedy Running Point, with Kate Hudson. In 2012, she made the Time magazine 100 Most Influential People In the World list. In 2022 her production company, Kaling International, was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential Companies.
Kaling, born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the second child of Hindu Indian immigrants – an ob/gyn physician mother who died of pancreatic cancer in 2012, and an architect father – has also consistently championed diversity, including her own south Asian heritage.
For series three of The Office, she themed an episode around the Hindu festival Diwali. The diverse Never Have I Ever cast was led by Canadian-Sri Lankan Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. The 2019 film Late Night, with Emma Thompson, starred Kaling as a writers’ room diversity hire, echoing her own experience at The Office.
As resolute as Kaling has been about representation, her comedy characters remain… characters. From intense, delusional abundantly lip-glossed Kelly Kapoor onwards, they’ve emerged as funny, flawed and fully formed, beyond their cultural identities.
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Among those she has inspired is the actor Sindhu Vee (Matilda The Musical; The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh; and Abi Morgan’s upcoming The Split Up), who is also a successful standup comedian and will be touring the UK with her show, Swanky, from September. Raised in India, and previously having worked as an academic and an investment banker, Vee had been taken aback to find her heritage of so much interest in comedy. Kaling she found inspiring because “she didn’t lead with ethnicity. Her Mindy show could have been about anybody,” Vee tells me. “That aspect of what she was doing resonated with me.”
Preeti Chattha’s podcast It’s Preeti Personal highlights the stories of young British south Asian females like herself. “My generation grew up with Mindy Kaling as one of the pioneers of south Asian representation in Hollywood,” she says.
Chattha recalls her own excitement at hearing about Never Have I Ever: “I screamed – a sitcom about a south Asian family and a south Asian girl. There’s something so powerful about seeing someone who looks like you growing up like you on screen.” Chattha appreciates how Kaling leads with character. “Our representation used to be very stereotypical: the best friend, the shy girl, the person getting an arranged marriage… My generation of south Asians have moved on. We’re not that any more.”
Kaling was born Vera Mindy Chokalingham (presciently, her parents named her after the sitcom Mork and Mindy). After obtaining a playwriting degree at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, she co-created the off-Broadway play Matt & Ben, playing “Ben Affleck” herself. It impressed Daniels, who hired her, at 24, for The Office. Kaling nevertheless continued to feel like an industry interloper, telling the Armchair Expert podcast, hosted by Dax Shepard and Monica Padman: “I was never part of a comedy clique.”
Was it this internalised outsider-ness that kept Kaling, the high priestess of self-deprecation, grounded and relatable? With all that early quipping about diets, body image and hopeless relationships; the stubborn cheerleading for the ever-derided woman-friendly art forms, the sitcom and romcom; the calling out of racial stereotyping and sexism, such as endlessly being asked if she had “imposter syndrome” by reporters.
These days, living in California, Kaling appears serene in the face of curiosity about her single status, as well as her recent weight-loss glow-up (she’s said she wants to avoid her family history of diabetes).
She also calmly shrugs off queries about the identity of the father of her three children: Katherine Sawti (born 2017), Spencer Avu (2020), and Anne (2024). She says she needs to discuss it with her children first, even as excitable rumours swirl about the father being BJ Novak, her Office co-star, one-time partner and great friend. Of Kaling’s approach to motherhood, Vee says: “It seems in perfect alignment with who Mindy Kaling has always told us she is: forget my gender, forget my ethnicity: listen to what I want to do.”
Wong finds it intriguing that, with Not Suitable For Work, Kaling returns to where it all began – the workplace comedy. “Mindy Kaling is of that (millennial) generation that’s just fascinated by work. It’s imprinted on our generation.”
It hasn’t all been triumphs for Kaling (2023 animation Velma was panned), and she again doesn’t appear in her latest venture. Her most notable recent screen appearance was in 2025 on Meghan Markle’s Netflix lifestyle show With Love, Meghan. In one deliciously chilling moment the Duchess reprimanded her for calling her “Meghan Markle” (“You know I’m a Sussex now”), Kaling’s politeness in the moment showcasing her acting abilities.
When will this most formidable of Hollywood multihyphenates act again? She recently hinted it could be soon. For one whose comedy treads deceptively lightly, Kaling is capable of mini-masterpieces of humour, pathos and bite. Watch this workspace.