Mindy Kaling recalls ‘devastating’ moment an Office co-star made an unsolicited remark about her body

‘This is my greatest insecurity and someone just called it out,’ actor said

Mindy Kaling has spoken out about the moment one of her co-stars made a joke about her weight when she was filming the hit sitcom The Office.

During an appearance on Good Morning America on Thursday (19 August), the actor revealed that her co-star advised that Kaling’s character, Kelly Kapoor, should lose 15 pounds.

“This is my greatest insecurity and someone just called it out,” Kaling said. “It’s really devastating.”

“I had a reckoning where I’m like, ‘People are scrutinising [me], and not only are they scrutinising [me], they’re verbalising their displeasure with how I look because I don’t look a certain way’,” she said. “That kind of dissonance has really affected so much of what I write about [and] the kind of characters I play.”

“Almost all of those kinds of things [in my work] come from something really real,” she said.

The mother of two also spoke candidly about an actor’s body weight on TV.

Mindy Kaling in 'The Office' with Steve Carell (NBC)

“On TV, if you were really thin, then you could be the lead. Otherwise, you had to be like 250 pounds, and you had to be the slapstick comic relief. But what was crazy, what was left out, is just like this range of people which is a majority of American women over the age of 24,” she told GMA.

“What if you’re like a [size] 12 and you want to just live your life and look cute and date? At that time, when I wrote Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? [in 2011] it was like a no man’s land. That has really changed, I think.”

Kaling’s hit series Never Have I Ever was renewed for a third season by Netflix this week. The news comes a month after the second season of the high school comedy premiered on the streaming service.