How Ben Affleck became the greatest role of Mindy Kaling’s career: “Just a dream as a writer and actor”
While Ben Affleck is without doubt the kind of Hollywood figure who will one day have someone play him in a biopic, Mindy Kaling is probably not the first name that people will have in mind to play him, but that’s probably because they won’t realise she’s already done it.
In fact, she did it a long, long time ago, many years before she was on The Office, and well before she’d won a Tony award, scooped six Emmy nods, or founded her own production company. She and her best friend had just graduated college and were trying to break into comedy writing in New York City when they came up with the idea of writing a show in which they each played one of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, creating the classic 1997 movie Good Will Hunting.
Kaling had been doing stand-up and making connections while working as an intern on the Late Night with Conan O’Brien show around 2002, and the play was good enough that the pair decided to make Matt & Ben into a proper production, showing ‘off-Broadway’ where it gained cult status, with tickets selling out and rave reviews in the national press.
Even with 20 years of success behind her, Kaling still looks back on those days and that role as a high point. She recalled, “Besides playing Mindy (in her own show, The Mindy Project), playing Ben Affleck was my most favourite role. The character had these sensitivities that were just a dream as a writer and actor, and they weren’t the same insecurities that I, as a woman, would have. This guy was really comfortable in his skin and his body. It was so freeing.”
The success that the play had was pivotal in the career that Kaling would go on to have. She was hired as a writer and performer on the US remake of The Office in 2004 and instantly stood out a mile as the side-eye throwing, much cooler than everyone else character, Kelly Kapoor, eventually spending nine seasons on the show, by the end of which she was an executive producer.
Once her time on that show came to a close, she had signed a deal to create her own, The Mindy Project, a romantic comedy which she starred in and co-wrote and that in turn ran for six seasons, earning Kaling a host of industry award wins and nominations.
In the 15 years since that began she’s gone on to create several more shows, like Never Have I Ever and The Sex Lives of College Girls, and now she’s come up with another one, called Not Suitable for Work, which apparently is definitely not a rip-off of Friends even if the premise of ‘five single people living in Manhattan in apartments across the hall from each other try to navigate their work and romantic entanglements’, sounds exactly like Friends.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Damon also has a big month coming up as July 17th sees the release of Christopher Nolan’s epic The Odyssey, in which he plays the lead role.
He and Affleck famously wrote Good Will Hunting in their early 20s, with Damon starting the project as part of a final assignment while studying English at Harvard. It ended up winning nine Oscar nominations, and the pair claimed the Academy Award for ‘Best Screenplay’.
