These are photos of Mindy Kaling going into and leaving the Ed Sullivan Theater a few days ago. She stopped by Letterman to promote her TV show, The Mindy Project, which will start on Fox new week. You know I like Mindy a great a deal – I have affection for all of the Indian and Indian-American actors trying to make it in Hollywood (because I’m Indian-American myself), but I have a special love for Mindy. She’s my Jennifer Garner, if truth be told. Many women see Jennifer Garner as their avatar in Hollywood – an “average” woman who prioritizes her family, who prioritizes “normal” in an abnormal world. That’s Mindy for me – refreshingly down-to-earth, funny and “normal”. She’s also one of the few women of color in a lead role in the current crop of television shows.
Mindy recently appeared on New York Magazine to promote her show too. You can read the full piece here, which I would recommend. It’s excellent. One of my favorite Mindy quotes: “I never want to be called the funniest Indian female comedian that exists. I feel like I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers that are out there. Why would I want to self-categorize myself into a smaller group than I’m able to compete in?” Other favorites: “If it were up to me, I’d look like a Vegas showgirl.” But when things get serious, Mindy is still really amazing. Here’s a profoundly moving part where Mindy discusses her mother’s death:
After the two-hour fitting and over BLTs, the conversation keeps turning to her mother. The chemotherapy started in May 2011, when Swati went to the doctor with a backache and ended up with a diagnosis of stage-four pancreatic cancer. There’d been no history of cancer in the family. Mindy took two months off from preproduction of season eight of The Office and moved back home. She wanted to be there to go with her mother to her chemotherapy appointments, to help her buy her first wig, to sit with her and watch the entire season of Modern Family, which Swati loved so much she was constantly telling her daughter that The Office should be more like it. “I was like, ‘Okay, Mom,’” says Kaling.
Kaling’s book was coming out in November, and she was living at home for the first time in over a decade. Reading through the sunny interviews she gave during that time, you’d never suspect anything was wrong.
The day her mother died, at age 65, less than eight months after her diagnosis, when Kaling was living in the hospital in a cot by her side, Reilly ordered the pilot for Fox. “And when my mom passed away and my dad was like, ‘Can you tell everybody?’ I went to get my phone, which I had not looked at for, like, 36 hours, and it was filled with e-mails and phone calls,” she says. “And I thought, How do people already know about my mom? But it was about the pilot, because the news had already gone out while I had been in this cocoon of this hospital with my family. It was the weirdest thing.”
“My relationship with my mom is really the single most profound relationship that I’ve ever had in my life,” she tells me. “By the way, it seems like I’m … I’m just blowing my nose. It’s not because I’m sad.” She has allergies and a cold, she promises. But her voice breaks when she starts talking about how she sat down with a pen and paper and asked her mother to give her all the advice she could possibly give her before she died, and Kaling realized she’d never be able to ask her mother for advice again. “I said to her, ‘Mom, I’m going to be so lonely without you.’” She’s crying now but keeps going. “And she just said, ‘You have to be your own best friend. If you always remember that, you will always have someone there with you.’”
One gets the sense that Kaling hasn’t given herself a chance to grieve, nor does she really want the chance. “Maybe I’ll be able to look back in a couple of years and understand,” she says. If she gets too reflective, she’ll get bogged down in sadness and anger thinking about how much her mother would have loved what was happening to her right now. “I like to move forward … I don’t know how much it would help for me to think about things too much. It just seems so f–king unfair. So I get on my elliptical machine and listen to some Rihanna and try to forget about this bulls–t.”
I’ll admit it: I’m weeping right now.
Anyway, last Mindy story – Page Six says that Mindy was spotted having lunch with JOHN MAYER yesterday at the Trump SoHo, and that they were “discussing her love life.” A spy says, “Mindy was asking for John’s advice. She said, ‘You have to tell me what you think! Please!’ ” Dear Mindy: please don’t receive or follow dating advice from the KKK Dong. He’s a terrible person.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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