Mindy Kaling
Mindy Kaling is an actor, born 1979.
Mindy Kaling was hired into the writers room of The Office in her twenties, one of the few women in it, and did what writers with access do: she wrote herself a part. Kelly Kapoor started as a handful of lines and grew into a character who could derail an entire episode with a monologue about her own love life, which is the career in miniature. Kaling wrote, produced and occasionally directed across most of the show's run while playing the person everyone else in the room found exhausting.
The Mindy Project, which she created and starred in from 2012, made the arrangement explicit. It is a romantic comedy about a woman who is vain, competitive, professionally excellent and completely unembarrassed about wanting things, and it holds up because Kaling never softens any of that into likeability. She founded Kaling International the same year and turned herself into a producer of other people's shows: Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls, Running Point, an animated Velma that split its audience down the middle.
Her film work runs on a separate track and is mostly supporting: comic ballast in The 40 Year Old Virgin and Ocean's Eight, voice roles in Inside Out and Wreck-It Ralph. The honours have piled up, a Tony Award, six Primetime Emmy nominations, the National Medal of the Arts in 2021, the Producers Guild's Norman Lear Achievement Award in 2023, and most of them recognise the building rather than the performing. She writes books too; Why Not Me? arrived in 2015.
Movies (20)
- Inside Out (2015)
- Despicable Me (2010)
- Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
- No Strings Attached (2011)
- The 40 Year Old Virgin (2005)
- Ocean's Eight (2018)
- Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009)
- This Is the End (2013)
- The Five-Year Engagement (2012)
- Friends: The Reunion (2021)
- License to Wed (2007)
- A Wrinkle in Time (2018)
- Riley's First Date? (2015)
- Locked Down (2021)
- The Night Before (2015)
- Late Night (2019)
- Unaccompanied Minors (2006)
- Family Feud (2018)
- 100 Years (2017)
- Mind Candy (2015)
TV (17)
- Not Suitable for Work (2026)
- The Office (2005)
- The Office (2005)
- Never Have I Ever (2020)
- The Mindy Project (2012)
- The Mindy Project (2012)
- The Sex Lives of College Girls (2021)
- Monsters at Work (2021)
- Running Point (2025)
- A Little Late with Lilly Singh (2019)
- Velma (2023)
- Some Good News (2020)
- Four Weddings and a Funeral (2019)
- Busy Tonight (2018)
- Champions (2018)
- Champions (2018)
- HitRECord on TV with Joseph Gordon-Levitt (2014)
Books (1)
Where to start with Mindy Kaling
Start with The Office, because Kelly Kapoor is where the voice was invented: a supporting character allowed to be shallow, loud and consistently funnier than the plot needed her to be. Then The Mindy Project, the fullest version of the same idea, six seasons of a lead who is never once asked to apologise for her ambition.
Of the shows she has produced since, Never Have I Ever is the best, sharper about grief and family than its teen-comedy packaging suggests, with The Sex Lives of College Girls as the looser, messier companion. Late Night is the film closest to her television voice, a workplace story about who gets let into the room and what it costs them once they are there.
The voice cameos are for completists. Inside Out gives her two or three excellent line readings and not much more than that.
The shows she created
Four series of her own in a decade, which is a rarer achievement than the acting career suggests. Never Have I Ever put a South Asian American teenager at the centre of a network comedy, which had essentially not happened.
The Office
She was hired into the writers' room at twenty four as the only woman in it, wrote more episodes than anyone else on the show, and played Kelly Kapoor throughout. This is where everything starts.
The film work
Supporting parts in studio comedies plus Late Night, which she wrote for herself and Emma Thompson and which is much the most interesting thing on her film record.
The voice work
Disgust in the Inside Out films is the widest-reaching thing she has done, and the rest is a steady run of animation across two decades of studio features.