Hollywood Darling Mindy Kaling Recalls Days Feeling Like An Outsider

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India-West News Desk

LOS ANGELES, CA – Mindy Kaling has built an impressive career in Hollywood, creating hit shows like The Mindy Project and Never Have I Ever. But despite her success, the actress, writer, and producer says she often felt like an outsider in the industry’s tight-knit comedy circles.

Kaling, 45, recently received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—an honor cementing her place in entertainment history. But looking back, she admits that in the early 2000s, she struggled with feeling excluded from the “comedy cliques” that dominated the industry.

“I was never part of a comedy clique,” Kaling shared on the Armchair Expert podcast with Dax Shepard. “I was really jealous, and I had a chip on my shoulder about it. Because in that aughts time [the early 2000s], you were in a clique or you weren’t.”

Though The Office—where she played Kelly Kapoor and worked as a writer—was a major success, Kaling still felt like an outsider. “Maybe people were like, ‘Well, she’s there,’ and maybe you could argue that that was a clique,” she said. “But the writing stuff was very competitive. We all had our own private ambitions, our own stuff we wanted to do. We wanted to write the best scripts, kill the table read, have Steve Carell think we were the funniest writer.”

She recalled watching other comedy groups rise together, admitting, “I was jealous of Judd [Apatow] and Seth [Rogen] and Jason [Segel], and then there was Amy [Poehler] and Tina [Fey], and Will [Ferrell] doing the ice-skating movie… I felt like the entire aughts was me coming up on a show that I loved but being like, ‘Why can’t I be in a clique?'”

But that sense of exclusion also motivated her. “It really fueled me in a good and bad way, where I was like, ‘I don’t have Lorne [Michaels], I don’t have Judd (Apatow). I don’t have any of these people who are going to do something for me. I gotta do it myself. I’m gonna show them all.'”