Why Not Me? (12 page)

I
KNOW WHAT YOU
see when you look at me. A powerful, self-realized woman of color with a brilliant mind and a body that won’t quit. But I wasn’t always this way. No, there was a time not long ago, when I was merely smart and hot. I’m so sorry, I’m obviously joking. But I guess there’s some truth in every joke? So maybe it’s kind of true?

I feel so lucky to have my career. But it was just over a decade ago that I was a scared twenty-four-year-old off-off-Broadway playwright trying to break in to TV writing with no connections in Hollywood. Not many people know me from back then, because I’ve had them all killed. Of the small handful of people still alive is my mentor, Greg Daniels.

Greg was the first person to hire me in Los Angeles, to work on
The Office
. You know when you meet someone so smart and cool that all their tastes and opinions seem like the correct ones? And you instantly think: those are my opinions now too! That’s Greg to me. He would say he loved Monty Python and suddenly they were my favorite comedy troupe too. Most important, he took a chance on me, and he provided me with an example of someone whose career I admired and wanted.

The word
mentor
is funny because it has a pedagogical, formal feel to it. Greg never sat me down and said, “I believe in you, kid. Now, here, take this antique fountain pen that W. C. Fields gave me and go make something of yourself.” He’s always just provided opportunities for me, set an example of how to be a leader, invited me to his house for dinner sometimes, and sat in consoling silence across from me when I was going through heartbreak. He’s wonderful.

I thought it might be interesting and useful to hear Greg talk about the experience of being a mentor and, if you’re lucky, how he taught me how to be brilliant and gorgeous.

•  •  •

MINDY ASKED
me to write a few words (actually 500 to 750, yikes) on “being a mentor, your philosophy on being a mentor, your relationship to me, your relationship to young women in your life, etc.” So here goes:

What is a mentor? In scriptwriting, it’s a character who teaches the hero something important, often dies at the act-two break, and provides that little extra bit of motivation the hero needs to climb tearfully over the mentor’s broken body and
get it done!
No, thank you. Who wants to play that role in real life? The entertainment industry is swarming with talented young people who are willing to climb over your broken body and get it done. They are your competition and should be ruthlessly put down, not trained and encouraged. The most sensible response to reading a talented newcomer’s spec script is to keep insisting, draft after draft, that it’s confusing in some way, until they move back home and live with their parents.

Yet for some reason, I have been caught mentoring people. Why?

I blame having children. It messes with your instincts for self-preservation and substitutes a love of boring a captive audience that is forced to look up to you. And because I have daughters, I was particularly susceptible to Mindy’s first message to me, conveyed through her agent, which was “Daddy, I need help with my math homework.”

Actually, Mindy described our first meeting in her first book. In her depiction, I have the social skills of a Sasquatch, torturing her with long silences. In that interview, though, Mindy was really timid (bizarre, right?) and not showing the disco-ball light show that is her relaxed mind and that I was expecting after reading her spec script and seeing her stage show. So I gave her a lot of room to shine and open up. How could I have known that staring at her without speaking for minutes at a time didn’t put her at ease? I’m not some mind-reading Sasquatch who knows the right thing to say in every situation. By now it should be clear that I don’t really know the definition of Sasquatch.

As a mentor, I brought some craft experience developed over hundreds of table reads and rewrites on previous shows that I worked on or ran, as well as all my grumpy prejudices and bitter show-biz feuds. In return, Mindy wrote hilarious jokes and fresh dialogue, which I put on the air with glee. Whether by giving notes on her outlines and scripts, cowriting Jim and Pam’s wedding, or pitching out a new animated show (still one of my favorite yet-to-be-produced projects ever), collaborating with Mindy is a joy.

I have had the benefit of a lot of great mentors, starting with Lorne Michaels and Jim Downey at
Saturday Night Live
, and including Jim Brooks, David Mirkin, and Al Jean and Mike Reiss at
The Simpsons
. I know a lot of people are probably thinking, good for you, but nobody has ever wanted to be
my
mentor. You take your mentoring where you can find it, even if it is not being offered to you. Have you ever used your neighbor’s Wi-Fi when it wasn’t on a password? If you have the opportunity to observe someone at work, you are getting mentoring out of them even if they are unaware or resistant. Make a list of the people you think would make the greatest mentors and try to get close enough to steal their Wi-Fi. I wrote a freelance
Seinfeld
episode for Larry David; I can’t say he took any interest in my welfare, but I was able to watch him work and pick up stuff. That’s what drew me to meet with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. They were practitioners of my chosen craft at the highest level possible, and if I had to pretend to be interested in adapting
The Office
for the United States in order to meet them, then so be it.

OK, I’m at about 660 words so far, and I haven’t even addressed “your relationship to young women in your life.” By the way, have you noticed what a shameless fishing expedition that question is? She just throws it in at the end of a list like I’m going to slip up and confirm my vacationing with Ariana Grande. We were photographed in the same airport lounge, OK? If there had been enough seats, she wouldn’t have been sitting on my lap. Just two random travelers killing time by hooking up. No big deal.

I LOVE SEX SCENES!

I
N HOLLYWOOD, I
am considered a prude. Perhaps the main reason is that I’m not a comedian who speaks frankly about my sexuality, making me the only woman in Hollywood who is not speaking frankly about her sexuality. You can’t walk down the street or be on any social media platform for more than nine seconds before an actress mentions how it’s imperative that she and everyone else “free the nips.” If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please Google it. You wouldn’t believe me if I explained it here. This is the world I live in.

People may also think I’m a prude because my television show, though about dating and romance, is not really about sex, like, say,
Sex and the City
was. That’s because my show is on a major network and you can’t show all that stuff, and also because my dad is alive and I would like to have lunch with him without feeling mired in dishonor.

The truth is I’m a weird mix of fearful New England prig and repressed pervert. On the one hand, I think sex is private and special, and I would rather die than ever write or talk about my sex life in any public way. And on the other, I am an unabashed lover of watching sexy situations on-screen, both as a viewer and, lately, as a participant on my own show.

My buddy Mark Duplass opening the door without a shirt on for a sexy interaction

So, there must be lots of other actors who love doing sex scenes too, right? Wrong. If you interview any actor about having to do sex scenes, you always get the same answer: they “hate” doing them.

It’s actually kind of annoying; you’re there for twelve hours; it’s exhausting.

—Justin Timberlake

There’s like one hundred and fifty crewmen watching and you see each other’s bits and pieces. The whole thing is just wrong
.

—Mila Kunis

They’re hard to do. You’re doing things that you’re supposed to do with only certain people in your life.

—Kerry Washington

I am here to tell you that they are all lying. Every last one of ’em. Obviously, on-screen sex is not actual penetrative sex, but as any religious high-schooler will tell you, simulating sex can be pretty damn enjoyable as well.

And why shouldn’t it be? You get to crawl around in a bed with another person you either a) already know really well or b) are getting to know better in the most cozy and intimate way possible. Yes, it is true that an entire room of people is watching you when you shoot a sex scene. To that, I say: the more, the merrier! Most of those people are artists whose job it is to make sure your physical imperfections are cloaked in mysterious shadows. By the end of the shooting day, you’ll wish there were
more
people there.

MINDY KALING, TONGUE BANDIT

Earlier this year I realized that, for a long time, I had been completely breaking the rules of stage kissing. I learned that among professional actors the tacit rule of on-screen kissing is “open mouth, no tongue.” In 1985, during the AIDS crisis, the Screen Actors Guild even made this their official policy. I, however, became a professional actor on
The Office
at the height of my early-twenties boy craziness, and the only person I was kissing was my best friend, B. J. Novak. We did not stage kiss because we didn’t know any better. It was just lights, camera, tongue-dance.