14 Days of Swooon
Inside Mindy Kaling’s Mind of Romance: Her Favorite Tropes, Spiciest TV Hot Take & More
If there is one entertainer out there who is as in love with romance as we are here at Swooon, it’s Mindy Kaling. From her Ryan-smitten and slightly unstable Kelly Kapoor on The Office to the snark-eyed optimism of The Mindy Project to creating and writing Netflix’s flirty/dirty duo Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls, Kaling has been a champion of comically complicated love (and inclusive storytelling) for nearly two decades.
Fittingly, her affair with affairs of the heart was formed by the O.G. queen of such things. “My parents growing up were very, what’s the word? Strict about what we read and what we watched,” admits the devoted mother of two. “[But] romantic comedy movies were kind of okay. So I feel like Sleepless in Seattle…you know, Nora Ephron was classy. That was a very classy, those kinds of Nora Ephron-type of movies were totally fine. So yeah, I would say Nora Ephron was my way in.”
Kaling continues that unlike so many burgeoning romance fans, she had never dipped her toes into the world of trashy Harlequin novels. “No, honestly, because I think that it would’ve been so inappropriate and having a conversation with my parents about it would’ve been so mortifying that…no!” she laughs. “They could just tell from the vivid artwork on the cover that leaves little to the imagination what those books were about. But the first sexy ones I even got through were the Flowers in the Attic books. V.C. Andrews was how I was titillated, but I wish it could have been romance novels.”
Jordin Althaus / Hulu / Everett Collection
Instead, it was Ephron and the classics who informed her point-of-view, which has helped make her characters both relatable and riotous. Calling her own Mindy Lahiri from The Mindy Project “a little bit of Bridget Jones meets Cartman,” Kaling happily confesses to creating “shows about women who are obsessed with love, romance, and sex, but are inherently just ambitious nerds.”
“They don’t know how to approach it at all. They have an idea of what romance is like and they have an idea of what romantic life is like. But they’re all pretty immature. And that—probably not surprisingly—comes from a truth about me,” she offers with her patented self-deprecation. “But I think for me, it’s like I was raised, I was that high school kid that read and loved Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma and Wuthering Heights…Love in the Time of Cholera. I really read these sweeping romantic books when I was a teenager, even though those books aren’t the sexiest,” she continues. “And I love sexy situations, and I love a ’90s sex thriller like everyone else. But the real love started with those kind of classics from high school.”
Today, Kaling’s literary tastes run a bit darker—she recently finished A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and the Tokyo-set murder mystery Out by Natsuo Kirino—and her book imprint, Mindy’s Book Studio, has become the coolest shelf in the market, thanks to a broad collection of diverse and emerging voices, including Sonali Dev’s The Vibrant Years and Amelia Diane Coombs’ Drop Dead Sisters. “I’m reading a lot of submissions for the imprint,” she says. “And some of those, I’m not totally sure I can talk about them. But I tend these days to not read things like anything that I write, I like to read things that are kind of different. But now I’m really excited to go on Swooon and get a recommendation for something!”
Scroll below to get a peek inside Mindy’s mind when it comes to all things romance.
What’s Her Top-Tier Romance Novel?
“Outlander by Diana Gabaldon was so amazing. And I don’t usually read those kind of historical romances,” she notes. “They’re not usually my jam. But I love the series so much. World-building is so hard to me. I do a lot of shows about experiences that I’ve directly had. My mom was a doctor. I’ve worked in an office, I’ve been to college, I’ve been to high school. So when somebody can create this world and there’s time travel? To me, that’s so impressive.”
What Makes Mindy Swoon?
“A funny guy.”
Why Did Mindy End Up With Danny?
Kaling feels the The Mindy Project couple was always endgame. “I think that character’s so lovable,” she says of Chris Messina‘s Danny Castellano. “He is just such a ‘me’ kind of character, and Chris is so funny and great in that role…and it’s just nice.” During a rewatch, Kaling clocked their chemistry again and credits the show’s writing team for paving the way to the series finale reunion befitting a classic romantic comedy. “Those characters have such good chemistry, the writers knew how to write for them, and I felt like they wanted that, too.”
What Are Her Favorite Trope(s)?
“Oh my God, I could talk about tropes all day! I mean, I’m Indian, so growing up watching Indian movies and Indian-American movies or British Indian movies, there’s obviously the arranged marriage [trope]. Now Indians in the diaspora get annoyed by that and I totally get it. But enemies-to-lovers is a trope that I love and utilize all the time because most people that I’ve ever had a crush on have started by lightly hurting my feelings.”
Additionally, Kaling has a soft spot for workplace romances, “but that to me is more like the trope of forced proximity. And if we’re just being honest, this is bad, but billionaire romances are really good and the one, what’s it called where someone’s like, it’s like the proposal where it’s like for work, we need to pretend we’re together? Fake date! That’s my dream.”
What Are the Key Ingredients to a Perfect Romance?
“The man has to be really hot, the woman has to be really smart. And I think enemies-to-lovers. I just love it.”
What’s Her TV Romance Hot Take(s)?
“One of my takes that makes my assistant Kate just want to quit is that I liked Joey and Rachel on Friends. I thought they were so cute. I think David Schwimmer is such a funny actor, but Ross never did it for me. I never understood it. And when Joey, who was so handsome and had a heart of gold and was becoming Rachel’s confidante and the person that helped after she had a baby, I was like, this is sweetest, most likable guy. And then when he accidentally proposed to her without knowing he did? I loved it. But I was really in the minority for that. I also really detested the Mr. Big-Carrie relationship. I never…oh God. I think everyone now has come to realize that.”
What’s Her Next Great Love?
Kaling’s latest creation, Running Point, starring Kate Hudson as the new head of L.A.’s pro basketball team, drops February 27 on Netflix.
