Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me_ (And Other Concerns) - Mindy Kaling [36]
Because people on the set are so normal, I’m usually very happy to dish about them. But I walk away from these encounters slightly disturbed, because I realize: no one wonders what I’m like in real life, because they assume I am Kelly Kapoor.
Obviously, this confusion is not something I would mind if I were playing Lara Croft or a Supreme Court justice or Serena Williams or something, but when you’re playing a bit of a selfish, boy-crazy narcissist, it’s a concern. And even though I’m a writer and producer (and sometimes director, technically making me a quadruple threat, what of it?) of the series, people tend to forget this in the face of the fact that the character Kelly and I both love shopping. To clear things up, here is a list of some differences between us, as I see it.
Things Kelly Would Do That I Would Not
• Fake a pregnancy for attention
• Fake a rape for attention
• Text while showering
• Consider driving away from the site of a vehicular manslaughter
• Plant evidence of cheating in order to confront a boyfriend
• Cry about a celebrity breakup
• Write a letter of support to Jennifer Aniston
• Write a mean anonymous letter to Lance Armstrong re: Sheryl Crow
• Use a voodoo doll
• Create an online persona to cyberbully a girl into being anorexic
• Blackmail a boyfriend into taking her out to dinner
Things Kelly and I Would Both Do
• Choreograph and star in a music video
• Fake our own deaths to catch a serial killer
• Cry at work occasionally
• Memorize our credit card numbers to shop online with ease
• Drive with our parking brake on
• Go to goop.com every day
• Spend hours following a difficult recipe, hate the way it tastes, and throw it out to go to McDonald’s
• Get upset if we’re not invited to a party
• Go on trendy and slightly dangerous diets
• Hold a royal wedding viewing party
Some of the world’s best comedians successfully play versions of themselves, like Woody Allen, Tina Fey, Ray Romano, and Larry David, but I am not doing that with Kelly. You’ll all get to see me ingeniously playing a version of myself when I do my own show, Mindy Kaling: Escaped War Criminal Hunter. Flying to Bolivia to extradite or execute Nazis? That is so quintessentially me.
I have the opportunity to write for Kelly, but more often than not, I am not really able to. When you write an episode of The Office, you are required to be on set supervising the shooting of your episode. If I’m acting as Kelly, that means I can’t be supervising the set as a producer, because I’m too busy acting in a scene, and so I have less control over the overall quality of the episode. Believe me, I’d love for Kelly to be in the show more, slowly encroaching on the leads’ air time until the show is renamed My Name is Kelly or A-B-C-D-E-F-G-H-I-J-KELLY! But given how many characters we have, the tertiary characters like Kelly tend to have one or two great lines per episode. Wait, what’s the thing that comes after tertiary? That’s Kelly.
LONG PAUSES WITH GREG DANIELS, GETTING HIRED, AND THE FIRST SEASON
People ask me all the time how I got hired onto The Office. Another common question is how do I manage to stay so down-to-earth in the face of such incredible success? This I can’t explain. It probably has something to do with innate goodness or something. A third frequently asked question is: “Girl, where you from? Trinidad? Guyana? Dominican Republic? You married? You got kids?” This is mostly asked by guys on the sidewalk selling I LOVE NEW YORK paraphernalia in New York City.
John Krasinski and I, professional actors, unable to complete a scene without laughing.
My career in Hollywood is owed to a man named Greg Daniels.