Mindy Kaling: Not being a white man is an asset ‘for the first time in my career’
The Cambridge native discussed the rise of "non-traditional" creators and her upcoming commencement speech at Dartmouth College.
Mindy Kaling has been called a “pioneer” for being one of the first South Asian women to write, star in, and produce her own TV show with “The Mindy Project.” But in a recent interview with The Boston Globe, Kaling said that being something other than a white man is only now “an asset now for the first time in my career.”
“Well, what’s really wonderful right now is that being a traditional creator — looking like the traditional TV and movie creator — is not what people actually want,” the Cambridge native told the Globe. “For years they’ve said that that’s not what they want, but they secretly just wanted a white man to just write everything and create everything. Now it feels like they actually do want other people to be making these [projects]. I think with the success of movies like ‘Black Panther’ and ‘Get Out,’ it’s about having non-traditional people behind the scenes, and, in fact, [on] the screen.”
Kaling, who stars in “Oceans 8,” out Friday, said she’d be in Boston next a little later this month. She’ll scoop up her relatives on the way to New Hampshire, where she will deliver a commencement speech at Dartmouth College, her alma mater, on June 10. Kaling, who also spoke at Harvard Law School’s graduation ceremony in 2014, said that writing commencement speeches is 1,000 times harder than writing for a sitcom or screenplay.
“It’s not just entertaining somebody for 22 minutes, and you’re not disappearing into my world — I’m going into their world to hopefully give them some actual pearls of wisdom,” Kaling told the Globe. “I don’t think anyone particularly tuned into my show for pearls of wisdom to navigate their early 20s, so I’m very nervous about it. I’m working a lot harder on it than I have on virtually anything else.”
