Mindy Kaling

Early life

Vera Mindy Chokalingam was born June 24, 1979, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Her parents who were then living in Nigeria, immigrated to the United States in 1979 with her elder brother, Vijay Chokalingam. Her father was an architect, and mother was an obstretrician/gynecologist at St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, Boston. Her mother died of pancreatic cancer in 2012.

Kaling has said she has never been called Vera, her first name, but has been referred to as Mindy since her mother was pregnant with her while her parents were living in Nigeria. They were already planning to move to the United States and wanted, Kaling said, a "cute American name" for their daughter, and liked the name Mindy from the show Mork & Mindy.

Kaling graduated from Buckingham Browne & Nichols School in 1997. The following year, she entered Dartmouth College, where she was a member of improvisational comedy troupe The Dog Day Players and a cappella group The Rockapellas, and wrote for the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, the college's humor magazine. Kaling graduated from Dartmouth in 2001 with a bachelor's degree in playwriting. She lists the comedy series Dr. Katz, Saturday Night Live, Frasier and Cheers as early influences on her comedy.

Career

2002–2004: Career beginnings

While a 19-year-old sophomore at Dartmouth, Kaling was an intern on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. She has said that she never saw a family like hers on TV, which gave her a dual perspective she uses in her writing. She thinks the "everyone against me" mentality is what she learned as a child of immigrants. She named her Mindy Project character Mindy Lahiri after author Jhumpa Lahiri. After college, she moved to Brooklyn, New York. She said one of her worst job experiences was as a production assistant for three months on the Crossing Over With John Edward psychic show. She described it as "depressing." During this same time, she performed stand-up comedy.

Kaling devised her stage name after discovering while doing stand-up comedy that emcees would have trouble pronouncing her last name, Chokalingam, and sometimes made jokes about it. She toured solo and with Craig Robinson, who was later a fellow cast member of The Office. In August 2002, she portrayed Ben Affleck in an off-Broadway play called Matt & Ben, which she co-wrote with her best friend from college, Brenda Withers, who played Matt Damon. Time magazine named it one of their "Top Ten Theatrical Events of The Year", and it was "a surprise hit" at the 2002 New York International Fringe Festival.

Initially, Withers and Kaling had, "for their own entertainment, mockingly pretended to be the best friends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck; that pretending spawned Matt & Ben, the goofy play that reimagined how Damon and Affleck came to write the movie Good Will Hunting." Kaling wrote a blog, Things I've Bought That I Love, which reemerged on her website on September 29, 2011. She wrote it under the name Mindy Ephron, "a name Kaling chose because she was amused by the idea of her 20-something Indian-American self as a long-lost Ephron sister."

2004–2011: ''The Office''

In 2004, when The Office producer Greg Daniels was working to adapt The Office from the BBC TV series of the same name, he hired Kaling as a writer-performer after reading a spec script she wrote. He said, "She's very original ... If anything feels phony or lazy or passé, she'll pounce on it." When Kaling joined The Office, she was 24 years old and was the only woman on a staff of eight. She took on the role of Kelly Kapoor, debuting in the series' second episode, "Diversity Day". Her TV appearances include a 2005 episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, playing Richard Lewis's assistant. She is featured on the CD Comedy Death-Ray and guest-wrote parts of an episode of Saturday Night Live in April 2006. After her film debut in The 40-Year-Old Virgin with Steve Carell, Kaling appeared in the film Unaccompanied Minors as a waitress.

In an interview with The A.V. Club, she stated that Kelly is "an exaggerated version of what I think the upper-level writers believe my personality is." Kaling directed The Office webisode The 3rd Floor. She directed the Season 6 episode "Body Language," which marked her television directorial debut. In 2007, she had a small part in License to Wed alongside fellow Office actors John Krasinski, Angela Kinsey, and Brian Baumgartner. She starred in the 2009 film Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian as a Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum tour guide.

On September 15, 2011, when her contract was set to expire at the end of Season 7, she signed a new contract to stay with the show for Season 8 and was promoted to full executive producer. Her Universal Television contract included a development deal for a new show (eventually titled The Mindy Project), in which she appeared as an actress and contributed as a writer. Kaling left The Office after the ninth-season episode "New Guys", but returned to guest-star in its final episode. In 2011, Kaling published a memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), which appeared on the New York Times Best Seller list. Her second book, Why Not Me?, covers the events that have happened in her life since 2011, and was published on September 15, 2015. She published a third memoir, Nothing Like I Imagined (Except For Sometimes), with Amazon Original Stories in 2020.

Kaling and her fellow writers and producers of The Office were nominated five consecutive times for the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series. In 2010, she was nominated with Daniels for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series for the episode "Niagara." In a 2019 interview with Elle Magazine, Kaling spoke about the sexism she faced with the Television Academy, having had to go to great lengths to prove her contribution as a producer when the academy informed her she would be cut from the producer list because there were too many producers. She said that to receive her rightful producing credit when The Office was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series, "They made me, not any of the other producers, fill out a whole form and write an essay about all my contributions as a writer and a producer… I had to get letters from all the other male, white producers saying that I had contributed, when my actual record stood for itself." In 2011, she played the role of Shira, a doctor who is a roommate and colleague of the main character Emma (played by Natalie Portman) in No Strings Attached. Kaling also made an appearance as Vanetha in The Five-Year Engagement in 2012.

2012–present: producing and film work

In 2012, Kaling pitched a single-camera comedy to Fox called The Mindy Project, which Kaling wrote, produced and starred in. Fox began airing the series in 2012. Also in 2012, Kaling founded the production company, Kaling International.

In 2013, Time magazine named one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Fox canceled her series The Mindy Project in May 2015, with it later being picked up by Hulu for a 26-episode fourth season and a 16-episode fifth season. In March 2017, Kaling announced that the show's sixth season, which would air starting September 2017, would be the last. The series concluded on November 14, 2017.

Kaling voiced Taffyta Muttonfudge in Disney's animated comedy film Wreck-It Ralph and Disgust in Pixar's 2015 film Inside Out. In 2017, NBC created Champions, where Kaling is a co-creator, writer, and producer. She had a recurring guest role on the show, which premiered March 8, 2018, on NBC. It was cancelled after one season. In 2018, she played Mrs. Who in A Wrinkle in Time, the live-action Disney adaptation of the novel, and starred alongside Helena Bonham Carter, Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Awkwafina and Rihanna in Ocean's 8, the all-female version of Ocean's Eleven. In 2020, Kaling created the Netflix series Never Have I Ever with Lang Fisher, a comedy partially based on Kaling's childhood story growing up in the Boston area. It premiered on Netflix on April 27, 2020, and is about an Indian American high school student, played by Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, dealing with the death of her father. The series received positive reviews. CNN and Teen Vogue have described the series as a watershed moment for South Asian representation in Hollywood, and praised Kaling for breaking South Asian stereotypes.

In February 2021, HBO Max announced they had ordered the adult-oriented Scooby-Doo spin-off series Velma, with Kaling as executive producer as well as voicing the titular character. The series premiered on January 12, 2023, to mixed to negative reviews from critics. Velma's fan reception was even more polarizing and got overwhelming negative reviews due to the humor and criticized its meta storytelling, characterization, writing, and departures from the traditional Scooby-Doo format. Velma was later ranked by several publications as one of the worst television series of 2023. That year, she was appointed as a board member along with historian June Li and Young Yang Chung for the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art.

In 2024, she joined the short film Anuja, as a producer. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film at the 97th Academy Awards.

Kaling co-created the Netflix sports comedy Running Point, which premiered in 2025. The series stars Kate Hudson as the new owner of a Los Angeles-based basketball team, and was inspired by the story of Jeanie Buss.

Personal life

Kaling has three children: a daughter, Katherine Swati, born in December 2017, a son, Spencer, born in September 2020 and a daughter, Anne, born in February 2024. She has kept the paternity of her children private. Kaling has expressed her desire to give her children a Hindu upbringing.

Kaling has a close friendship with B. J. Novak, who she met through writing for The Office, with Novak calling Kaling "the most important person in my life" (on Fresh Air with Terry Gross). They dated on and off while writing and acting on the show. Novak is the godfather of Kaling's first two children.

In 2012, Kaling was included in the Time 100 list of the world's most influential people. In 2014, she was named one of Glamours Women of the Year. On June 10, 2018, she received an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. In October 2023, Kaling took to social media to stand alongside Israel. In June 2024, the Los Angeles Times featured Kaling in its "L.A. Influential" series as a "creator who is leaving their mark" in Los Angeles.

Filmography

Film

Television

Writing credits

Directing credits

Awards and nominations

Over her career she has received two Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Tony Award, and six Primetime Emmy Awards nominations. She was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2013. A decade later she received the Producers Guild of America's Norman Lear Achievement in Television Award, and was awarded the National Medal of the Arts from President Joe Biden.

In 2013, Entertainment Weekly identified Kaling as one of the "50 Coolest and Most Creative Entertainers" in Hollywood. In the same year, Kaling was recognized by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In March 2023, Kaling was awarded the 2021 National Medal of Arts from the US president Joe Biden in the White House.

Bibliography

• Kaling, Mindy, and Brenda Withers. Matt & Ben: A New Play. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2004;
• Kaling, Mindy. Unbelievable Holiday Tales: Scripting a Fantasy of a Family, The New York Times, December 18, 2009.
• Kaling, Mindy. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns), New York: Crown Archetype, 2011; ;
• Kaling, Mindy. Questions I Ask When I Want to Talk About Myself: 50 Topics to Share With Friends, Clarkson Potter, 2013;
• Kaling, Mindy. Why Not Me?, New York : Crown Archetype, 2015; ;
• Kaling, Mindy. Nothing Like I Imagined (Except for Sometimes), Amazon Original Stories, 2020

References

References

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