Mindy Kaling.Photo: David Crotty/Patrick McMullan via Getty
ForMindy Kaling, her work as an actor often imitates real life — and that can be painful.
Kaling can still remember the “devastating” moment when she felt mostself-conscious about her body,and it was years ago when she was 25, workingas a writer and actor.
“This is my greatest insecurity and someone just called it out,“she recalled toGood Morning Americaon Thursday. “It’s really devastating.”
Kaling, who said that she was regularly getting up early in the morning during that time to fit in a gym workout before her dual jobs, took the incident as a moment for self-reflection.
“I had a reckoning where I’m like, ‘People are scrutinizing [me], and not only are they scrutinizing [me], they’re verbalizing their displeasure with how I look because I don’t look a certain way. That kind of dissonance has really affected so much of what I write about [and] the kind of characters I play,” she said. “Almost all of those kinds of things [in my work] come from something really real.”
TheNever Have I Everco-creatornoted that for years, there was a lack of diverse body types in Hollywood.
Kaling said that “it was like a no man’s land” for women with other body types in the early 2010’s, but she has seen a shift, both for body and racial diversity.
“That has really changed, I think,” she said, adding thatNever Have I Ever, which focuses on an Indian American girl going through the trials and tribulations of teen life in Southern California, is part of that new landscape.
“It makes me so happy that this show can be on Netflix, 40 million people can watch it, it’s No. 1 around the world and it stars a girl who is a young, dark-skinned Indian girl,” she said. “She’s real, and she dates and boys like her, boys hate her, she goes in and out of drama, fights with her friends, but she’s normal and she’s the point of view character and so you can look to that and feel seen, to use a phrase that people much younger than me use.”
source: people.com
