‘The Office’ Producer Michael Schur Once Called Mindy Kaling ‘Very Pro-Gun’
Mindy Kaling has never shied away from sharing her opinions, even as her career grew. She got her start writing for and starring in The Office. She played Kelly Kapoor, Dunder Mifflin Scranton’s customer service representative who loves gossip and Netflix rom-coms. In a 2012 interview, Office producer and writer Michael Schur spoke about working with Kaling and how it came out that she had, at the time, more conservative views than a lot of her peers.
Michael Schur said Mindy Kaling was ‘always talking about wanting to buy a gun’
Schur and Kaling spent a lot of time together working on The Office. When Schur was interviewed by Vulture in 2012, he mentioned learning about Kaling’s politics.
“It sort of snuck out that she was planning on — I don’t know if she did or not — but she was at least thinking about voting for Bush.”
The writer/producer/actor added that Kaling, at the time, was “very pro-gun, which is very odd.”
“She’s always talking about wanting to buy a gun, and I’m always like, ‘If you buy a gun you will kill yourself accidentally or you will harm another person. There’s no way you could own a gun successfully and responsibly for more than a week without harming someone,” he said.
Schur also made a point to tell the publication what a big fan of Kaling’s he is.
“The umbrella thing that I would like to get across to you is that I think she’s a wonderful human being and I hope she and I are friends forever. I just want to make that perfectly clear. And when I say she’s a disaster and a complete wreck of a human being, that’s coming from a place of love,” he said.
Mindy Kaling’s parents
Vulture reported that both of Kaling’s parents were Republicans. They met in Nigeria where her father, Avi Chokalingham, was the architect designing the wing of the hospital her mother, Swati, was working in. Swati passed away in 2012. She was Kaling’s best friend.
“She didn’t plan it, it just happened,” Kaling told the publication. “She moved to Nigeria to be a doctor and was just living there and my dad met her and he pursued her. And as my grandmother always said, the best relationships are the ones where the guy likes the girl a little bit more than the girl likes the guy.”
It was Kaling’s relationship with her mother that made her realize she really wanted to have kids. She currently has a two-year-old little girl.
“My relationship with my mom is really the single-most profound relationship that I’ve ever had in my life. And when people talk about soul mates, they largely mean romantic soul mates, but my soul mate was really my mother. And I think that the relationship that I had with her … when she died, that’s when I was like, ‘I really want to have kids.’ I mean I always knew I wanted kids, but when my mom passed away I was like, ‘I want a bunch of kids. I want three kids or four kids, and I want to have that relationship again.’ I can’t bring my mom back, but I can have children,” she said.
Undoubtedly, Kaling’s parents played a role in her early politics.
Since then, Kaling’s politics may have changed a bit. She’s always active about the issues she’s passionate about on social media, like LGBTQ rights and Black Lives Matter. In 2016, she supported Hillary Clinton, tweeting “YAS KWEEN” when she became the Democratic Party’s nominee.
