Mindy Kaling is looking at the life she thought she would have, and the one she actually built, from an office filled with souvenirs of both. At Los Angeles Center Studios in downtown Los Angeles, where she met an interviewer, the creator and executive producer of Hulu’s new Not Suitable for Work talked about the plans she made as a young woman and how far off they turned out to be.
Kaling, 46, said she once expected to become a comedy writer, marry at 24, have her first baby at 27 and finish her family by 32. Instead, she landed a writing job on The Office at 24 and moved to Los Angeles, beginning a career that has stretched across television, film and voice work. “It’s really fascinating to me that, personally, nothing really happened the way that I imagined it would,” she said.
The office itself reads like a private archive. Baseball hats from shows she has worked on sit alongside her old Dartmouth mailbox. Framed photos of her children are displayed near a framed selfie of her and B.J. Novak, while the words “Never Complain, Never Explain” appear embroidered on mustard fabric in a bedazzled frame, a gift from Novak. The room is a snapshot of a career that has never been limited to one role or one version of success.
That career has been built piece by piece over more than 20 years. Kaling created and starred in 117 episodes of The Mindy Project, then moved through acting roles in Late Night, A Wrinkle in Time and Ocean’s Eight. She also voiced Disgust in Inside Out and co-created and wrote projects including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Champions, Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls.
The contrast between the plan and the result gives her current work added weight. Kaling said she had imagined a tidy timeline for marriage and children, but “literally none of that happened.” The remark lands with particular force now because her professional life, once the thing she thought she could map out most easily, has turned into a career defined by reinvention and range, while her home life is centered on Katherine, who is also called Kit and is 8, Spencer, who is 5, and Anne, who is 2.
The question now is not whether Kaling stayed on the path she once drew for herself. She did not. The more relevant fact is that she built something broader than the plan, and Not Suitable for Work arrives as the latest expression of that career: a new series from a writer who got to Los Angeles at 24, stayed, and kept turning the unexpected into a body of work.
