As an Indian woman, I admire the hell out of Mindy Kaling. She’s one of the hardest working people in Hollywood at the moment – and also one of the funniest.
In her most recent film Late Night – which she stars in, produced and wrote – Mindy plays Molly Patel, a first-time TV writer who ends up on an all-white-male writers room thanks to a last-ditch diversity hire to freshen up the writing on a late night show.
One man in the film even says, “I wish I was a woman of colour so I could just get any job I want.”
It seems the movie is an example of life imitating art with Mindy telling Yahoo Entertainment she went through something very similar herself, “I thought it was fun to actually talk about diversity hires in a really open way, because I was a diversity hire for The Office.”
Much respect to @MindyKaling:
“I was a diversity hire for The Office… I used to be so embarrassed about that… What I didn't realize then was then was that it wasn't something to be ashamed of, [it] was giving me something that other people have born access to.” #LateNight pic.twitter.com/AfsRglH8jU
— Kevin Polowy (@djkevlar) June 4, 2019
Mindy explained that she came up through the NBC diversity writing program and that when she first got hired as a writer on The Office at just 24 years old she worried her colleagues would assume she was only hired because of her race and gender and not her talent.
Mindy first appeared on The Office in episode two, which was aptly named ‘Diversity Day’.
“I was so embarrassed that people would know about it, and I wouldn’t tell anyone.”
“I thought, ‘Okay, well…the other writers will think that was the only reason I was hired.’”
“What I didn’t realize then was that it wasn’t something to be ashamed of, that this really great organization was giving me something that other people have born access to. And I won’t ever be embarrassed about it again.”
“What’s great about the movie is we make no bones about it. She was strictly hired for that reason and then sort of blossomed through that role. So I thought that was really nice to be able to write about.”
Hell. Yes. Mindy.
