Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) (12 page)

THE KLUTZ

When a beautiful actress is in a movie, executives wrack their brains to find some kind of flaw in her that still allows her to be palatable. She can’t be overweight or not perfect-looking, because who would want to see that? A not 100-percent-perfect-looking-in-every-way female? You might as well film a dead squid decaying on a beach somewhere for two hours.

So they make her a Klutz.

The 100-percent-perfect-looking female is perfect in every way, except that she constantly falls down. She bonks her head on things. She trips and falls and spills soup on her affable date. (Josh Lucas. Is that his name? I know it’s two first names. Josh George? Brad Mike? Fred Tom? Yes, it’s Fred Tom.) Our Klutz clangs into Stop signs while riding a bike, and knocks over giant displays of expensive fine china. Despite being five foot nine and weighing 110 pounds, she is basically like a drunk buffalo who has never been a part of human society. But Fred Tom loves her anyway.

THE ETHEREAL WEIRDO

The smart and funny writer Nathan Rabin coined the term
Manic Pixie Dream Girl
to describe a version of this archetype after seeing Kirsten Dunst in the movie
Elizabethtown.
This girl can’t be pinned down and may or may not show up when you make concrete plans. She wears gauzy blouses and braids. She decides to dance in the rain and weeps uncontrollably if she sees a sign for a missing dog or cat. She spins a globe, places her finger on a random spot, and decides to move there. This ethereal weirdo abounds in movies, but nowhere else. If she were from real life, people would think she was a homeless woman and would cross the street to avoid her, but she is essential to the male fantasy that even if a guy is boring, he deserves a woman who will find him fascinating and pull him out of himself by forcing him to go skinny-dipping in a stranger’s pool.

THE WOMAN WHO IS OBSESSED WITH HER CAREER AND IS NO FUN AT ALL

I, Mindy Kaling, basically have two full-time jobs. I regularly work sixteen hours a day. But like most of the other people I know who are similarly busy, I think I’m a pleasant, pretty normal person. I am slightly offended by the way busy working women my age are presented in film. I’m not, like, always barking orders into my hands-free phone device and telling people constantly, “I have no time for this!” I didn’t completely forget how to be nice or feminine because I have a career. Also, since when does having a job necessitate women having their hair pulled back in a severe, tight bun? Often this uptight woman has to “re-learn” how to seduce a man because her estrogen leaked out of her from leading so many board meetings, and she has to do all sorts of crazy, unnecessary crap, like eat a hot dog in a libidinous way or something. Having a challenging job in movies means the compassionate, warm, or sexy side of your brain has fallen out.

THE FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD MOTHER OF THE THIRTY-YEAR-OLD MALE LEAD

I am so accustomed to the young mom phenomenon, that when I saw the poster for
The Proposal
I wondered for a second if the proposal in the movie was Ryan Reynolds suggesting he send his mother, Sandra Bullock, to an old-age home.

However, given the popularity of teen moms right now, this could actually be the wave of the future.

THE SASSY BEST FRIEND

You know that really horny and hilarious best friend who is always asking about your relationship and has nothing really going on in her own life? She always wants to meet you in coffee shops or wants to go to Bloomingdale’s to sample perfumes? She runs a chic dildo store in the West Village? Nope? Okay, that’s this person.

THE SKINNY WOMAN WHO IS BEAUTIFUL AND TONED BUT ALSO GLUTTONOUS AND DISGUSTING

Again, I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief during a romantic comedy for good set decoration alone. One pristine kitchen from a Nancy Meyers movie like in
It’s Complicated
is worth five Diane Keatons being caught half-clad in a topiary or whatever situation her character has found herself in.

But sometimes even my suspended disbelief isn’t enough. I am speaking of the gorgeous and skinny heroine who is also a disgusting pig when it comes to food. And everyone in the movie—her parents, her friends, her boss—are all complicit in this huge lie. They are constantly telling her to stop eating and being such a glutton. And this actress, this poor skinny actress who so clearly lost weight to play the likable lead, has to say things like “Shut up you guys! I love cheesecake! If I want to eat an entire cheesecake, I will!” If you look closely, you can see this woman’s ribs through the dress she’s wearing—that’s how skinny she is, this cheesecake-loving cow.

You wonder, as you sit and watch this movie, what the characters would do if they were confronted by an actual average American woman. They would all kill themselves, which would actually be kind of an interesting movie.

THE WOMAN WHO WORKS IN AN ART GALLERY

How many freakin’ art galleries are out there? Are people constantly buying visual art or something? This posh-smart-classy job is a favorite in movies. It’s in the same realm as kindergarten teacher in terms of accessibility: guys don’t really get it, but the trappings of it are likable and nonthreatening.

ART GALLERY WOMAN:
Dust off the Rothko. We have an important buyer coming into town and this is a really big deal for my career. I have no time for this!

This is one of the rare clichés that actually has a male counterpart. Whenever you meet a handsome, charming, successful man in a romantic comedy, the heroine’s friend always says the same thing. “He’s really successful—he’s an…

(say it with me)

…architect!”

There are like nine people in the entire world who are architects, and one of them is my dad. None of them looks like Patrick Dempsey.

All About
The Office

T
HE OFFICE
is a big chapter in my life, so that is why it’s a big chapter in my book. It is what I’m best known for and what people ask me about the most. I’d like to be cool enough to say I’m sick of talking about it, the way Jennifer Lopez doesn’t want to talk about her butt anymore, but
The Office
is still a significant part of my life, and I think it is awesome. So, here we go.

People are always asking me what my castmates on
The Office
are really like: Is Steve Carell really as nice as he seems? Is John Krasinski as cool as Jim in real life? What about Rainn Wilson; is he as big an egomaniac as Dwight? The answers are: yes, yes, and much, much worse.

I love watching
The Real Housewives
of any city, so I have an appreciation for lunatic divas. So it is a little disappointing that there aren’t any on our show. Sure, there are occasional tantrums and arguments, and as I’ve said, Rainn is the absolute worst, but other than that, there’s not too much to tell. We don’t have any sensational meltdowns if, say, Catering accidentally puts chickpeas in a star’s salad. Actually, wait, maybe
I’m
that person. I will throw a salad across the room if there are chickpeas in it, I swear to God.

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. He and his wife, Susanne, saw
Matt & Ben,
and soon after, I got a call from my agent, Marc, who told me that Greg wanted to meet me for a general.

General
is short for “general meeting,” which is one of the most vague and dreaded Hollywood inventions. It essentially means “I am curious about you, but I don’t want to have a meal with you, and I want there to be little expectation of any tangible outcome from our meeting.” Most of the time with generals, neither person knows exactly why they are meeting the other person, and so you talk about L.A. traffic patterns and which celebrities are looking too thin these days. The meetings are fun if you like chatting, which I do, but frustrating if you like moving forward with your life, which I also do. But usually you get a free bottle of water.

I was incredibly nervous meeting Greg, because his reputation preceded him. Even my dad knew who he was, because of the opening credits in
King of the Hill,
one of the only animated shows he didn’t think was destroying the minds of American youth. Greg had been on the staff of
The Harvard Lampoon,
a writer for
Saturday Night Live
(where he was writing partners with Conan O’Brien),
The Simpsons,
and
Seinfeld,
and created
King of the Hill.
If he’d died after just doing that, people still would have been sad to read his obituary. When I met him, he had just turned forty.

I got to the meeting early. It was held at the
King of the Hill
offices in Century City. Century City is a commercial business area with lots of gleaming high-rises. To help you visualize it, this is the area where Alan Rickman held all those people hostage in
Die Hard.
A bored twentysomething guy greeted me at Reception. Actually, he did not greet me. It took him a full minute or so before he looked away from his computer game to acknowledge me standing nervously in front of his desk. When people show a lack of excitement to see me, I compensate by complimenting the hell out of them. It always exacerbates the problem, but I cannot stop. I focused on his tidy work area.