Mindy Kaling Says She Never Felt Like She Was ‘Part of a Comedy Clique’ in Hollywood — and Admits That Made Her ‘Jealous’

Despite being one of the most successful female comedy writers and actresses, Mindy Kaling says she often felt left out of the “comedy cliques” that abounded in Hollywood in the early 2000s.

Speaking on an episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, 45-year-old Kaling opened up about the work she took on during and after her stint as Kelly Kapoor on The Office, saying, “I was never part of a comedy clique.”

“I was really jealous and I had a chip on my shoulder about it. Because in that aughts time [the early 2000s], you were in a clique or you weren’t. I was on The Office, so maybe people were like, ‘Well, she’s there,’ and maybe you could argue that that was a clique,” Kaling said. “But the writing stuff was very competitive with each other. We all had our own private ambitions, our own stuff we wanted to do. We wanted to write the best scripts, kill the table read, have Steve Carell think we were the funniest writer.”

She continued: “I was jealous of Judd [Apatow] and Seth [Rogen] and Jason [Segel] and then there was Amy [Poehler] and Tina [Fey], and Will [Ferrell] doing the ice-skating movie … I felt like the entire aughts was me coming up on a show that I loved but being like, ‘Why can’t I be in a clique?’ ”

But not being part of a “clique,” she explained, ultimately helped to ignite her drive.

“It really fueled me in a good and bad way, where I was like, ‘I don’t have Lorne [Michaels], I don’t have Judd. I don’t have any of these people who are going to do something for me. I gotta do it myself. I’m gonna show them all.’ ”

Kaling added that, while acting in the 2005 film The 40-Year-Old Virgin, directed by Judd Apatow, she felt out of place.

Explaining how some of the other actors were “sitting at the front by the monitors, joking around, talking,” Kaling said she was sitting near the back.

She continued: “It became so awkward because I didn’t feel like I knew how to jump in. And I also knew — because I’d been on The Office — that feeling that someone’s trying to be part of it, and I didn’t want to do that. Desperation.”

“So I just went back to my trailer,” Kaling added. “But I remember thinking, ‘What a missed opportunity.’ “

In the years since, though, Kaling has proved she didn’t need an ambitious circle of friends to propel her own success.

The Sex Lives of College Girls creator, who recently received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, appeared as the title role in the 2010s series The Mindy Project and also created the Netflix series Never Have I Ever and Running Point,