Mindy Kaling’s Not Suitable For Work Cast Are Just Getting Started

As soon as they all join a mid-afternoon Sunday video call together, Ella Hunt, Avantika, Nicholas Duvernay, Jack Martin and Will Angus cannot help but fall right back into five simultaneous conversations. Belated birthdays are celebrated, jokes about Angus’ “weird bachelor landlord” fly out and everyone immediately starts reminiscing about the last time they all saw one another.

“Do you remember those fuck-ass white cowboy boots?!” Avantika asks Duvernay, cackling as she does. He can’t stop himself from laughing at the inside joke: “Yeah, I’m never wearing those ever again.”

It’s the kind of chaotic chat that’s typically reserved for people who have known one another forever; just a year ago, these five adults were strangers.

That changed when they were each cast as the leads of Not Suitable For Work, Hulu’s new coming-of-age comedy created by sitcom veteran Mindy Kaling. Taking place in Murray Hill — Manhattan’s most notorious dwelling for fresh-out-of-college finance bros — the show follows a group of five 20-somethings as they enter the workforce and realize just how little they actually know about work, life, and what it means to balance the two.

It’s a ubiquitous format, and one that the show isn’t trying to reinvent. New Girl, Girls, and even Kaling’s own shows like The Mindy Project and The Sex Lives of College Girls all benefited from the familiarity of this premise. As Avantika puts it, that’s part of what makes Not Suitable for Work the kind of show people will keep watching.

“Mindy does ‘easy show’ really well, and by ‘easy,’ I mean, ‘I am sitting on my couch, and I need to put something on and feel good,’” she explains. “I think that's what makes her content unique in the current landscape — it's hard to find shows like that where you also get characters that feel well thought-out and not just surface level.”

Throughout its nine episodes, the debut season of NSFW dives deep into the lives of its ensemble cast, as each of them approaches their respective careers with wildly differing levels of success. Hunt’s character, for example — the ambitious, high-strung AJ Pascarelli — nabs an entry-level job at an investment bank and immediately finds herself struggling to get ahead without drawing the ire of her overbearing boss (Insecure’s Jay Ellis).

While that relationship could be fodder for the kind of high-stakes dramatic acting that Hunt is known for, from projects like Dickinson or Horizon: An American Saga, it instead gives way to some of the show’s funniest scenes, as AJ continues to go above and beyond to impress her boss, often to her own detriment. “I remember that I got sent scripts for the first three episodes, and by the end of reading them, I was cry-laughing,” Hunt says. “I was immediately struck by how legitimately funny it was.”

The cast is well aware that the success or failure of an ensemble-led sitcom rests largely on the chemistry between the lead characters. It just so happens they found that chemistry almost instantly when they began shooting in September.

“It was immediate,” Duvernay says. “From day one of meeting these people, they were all just so magnetic in their own way, and it is perfect casting all around.”

On paper, Jack Martin’s character Josh Teitelbaum could easily fit in as a character on an episode of Succession. The handsome, entitled son of a billionaire media mogul, Josh starts the season by getting a job at the prestigious news program his dad owns because of his last name, and in spite of the fact that he was initially rejected for the position. Yet even with a character who seems designed to be disliked, Martin — who starred in the NBC drama La Brea and the recent Hulu stoner flick Pizza Movie — brings an earnest charm to Josh.

“In a lot of my favorite shows, the characters are all the worst people of all time,” Martin says, citing Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and others. “I felt like, if all of those other all-time-great actors can be on the side of those characters that are, on the scale of things, way worse than Josh, then maybe I could figure something out with him.”

The same holds true for Angus’ character Davis Beau Bradley Barrett III, a character whose very name and job as a striving investment banker seem like thinly veiled jabs at the many former frat boys populating Murray Hill. But Angus makes Davis out to be a loveable hopeless romantic trying — and more often than not, failing — to find someone else to adore.

For Angus, NSFW marks a major first in his career. After coming up through TikTok and the online sketch comedy group Almost Friday, Angus’ role in the new series marks his first foray into scripted television. “I was very nervous, I definitely was dealing with a little bit of imposter syndrome,” he explains of getting the role. “And it's very different — if I do a sketch or a character that fully bombs, I can just throw it away and then never come back to it. Here, you don't just get to start over from the beginning. But it's made easier because the writers are so on top of everything. They have such a singular vision for the character that it made it very easy to walk into this part.”

In the show, Angus and Martin’s characters are best friends and roommates — and for the three months that they shot in New York, the pair lived together in a Williamsburg apartment. “You could say that we were fully method,” Martin jokes. Angus quickly joins in on the bit: “We fully plan to do it again — we've been trying to convince Nick to do triple bunk beds with us in Brooklyn.”

While Hunt and Avantika also play roommates, the two didn’t cohabitate during their shoot. According to Avantika, they didn’t have to — the pair hit it off immediately during a chemistry test in Los Angeles, and they maintained that friendship throughout the shoot. “You always feel an instant chemistry with one person when you're in a chemistry read, but you never want to say it out loud because sometimes that's not the person they pick for the part,” she explains. “Luckily, I felt that spark with Ella, and once we both got cast, we got to New York, we got pho together and went to an art gallery that was opening.”

Hunt cites that particular art gallery date as a moment where the two felt immediately in-character. “I invited Avantika to this art show where there were maybe one or two people there that I knew. Sure enough, we get there, and Avantika knows like 50 percent of the room,” she says with a laugh. “It's so deeply AJ and Abby of us.”

Abby Chilukuri, Avantika’s character, works as an assistant to a demanding fashion stylist, played by a hilarious Constance Wu, who Avantika describes as “the most wonderful scene partner.”

She spends much of her screen time desperately trying to keep her boss happy while navigating a potential romance with one of her famous clients (Harry Richardson). While she’s been acting since she was 10 years old and has starred in projects like the 2024 Mean Girls remake and the 2021 Disney Channel Original Movie Spin, Avantika still counts NSFW as a career highlight thanks, in part, to Kaling’s involvement.

“She was always at the top of my bucket list of people I wanted to work with, because she was always there championing brown women in her shows, and doing them so much justice as complicated characters,” she says. “Despite having amassed this creative empire, she really approaches her work on set with such humility and collaboration.”

Tales of Kaling’s calm demeanor and collaborative spirit are repeated often throughout the conversation. Duvernay in particular recalls feeling the pressure mount after he was offered the part— despite his stints on hit shows like The White Lotus and Bel-Air, he still wasn’t sure if he was right for the role.

“I watched so many comedies growing up and just thought, 'Wow, these people are funny, am I funny enough to be in a comedy?’ When I got it, I was still in my head, wondering if this was gonna work.” He recalls that “Mindy noticed that and was just like, ‘Hey, relax, you're the guy.’ Having someone like that on set, who's so tried and true and is such a veteran in a league of her own, you have both this need to please her and this confidence that she picked you for a reason.”

He pauses for a moment, then adds that “she's also got the best fashion sense I think I've ever seen on another human being.” Martin sees his opportunity and jumps at it: “I actually think Nick has the best fashion sense I've ever seen on a person,” he says, with a wry smile. Once again, the conversation returns to Duvernay’s “fuck-ass white cowboy boots” he wore to an early morning shoot. “You literally have to keep wearing them,” Avantika says between giggles.

Of the many roles he’s played throughout his career, Duvernay hasn’t related to any in quite the same way he relates to Kel Washington. Both he and his character dropped out of school to pursue acting, and upon doing so, both of them quickly realized that they were going to go broke if they didn’t get a part time job. Where Kel picks up work as an English teacher, Duvernay instead worked a series of increasingly odd part-time gigs in L.A. just to make ends meet.

“I was driving delivery, I worked a graveyard shift at a bakery making muffins overnight for the mornings, just all these little side jobs that I picked up to survive as an actor,” he says, sighing. “[The show] can be a little bit of a mindblur, to be honest — I'm doing what I'm doing now because I followed my dreams to do it, but now I'm playing the kid who's trying to follow his dreams, so I kind of see it from almost an older brother perspective. I just wanna hug him and say, ‘It’s all gonna work out … you're broke, but keep at it and one day you'll be on a show and Mindy Kaling will be your boss.’”

Meanwhile, the rest of the NSFW cast had to do a little more work to get into character. Or, as Angus quips: “I had no clue what the hell was going on in any of my work scenes.” Hunt nods in agreement, adding that her character’s outfits helped her find the confidence she needed to play an aspiring Wall Street professional.

“I had so much fun cosplaying an investment banker out and about in Hudson Yards, to be honest,” she said. “My costumes were a lot of ties, a lot of waistcoats, a lot of Annie Hall nods, and I'd go out to get lunch, and I'd see businesswomen kind of checking me out — it felt like I was a fully different person.”

Even for the parts of their characters that they didn’t have a direct connection to, all five actors say that they understood their characters’ mindsets as young people attempting to balance work and life in a culture that doesn’t promote a healthy relationship with your job.

“The median homeowner age is, what, 59 now?” Martin says. “The Gen Z experience is that everyone is roommates, and they meet by being roommates for this long. Work is taking over your life, and you're trying to progress and that’s not even really working. That is what the show communicates so well.”

Vandanapu agrees, adding that NSFW manages to present an accurate read on what entering the workforce today is actually like, instead of presenting a loose jumble of stereotypes about an entire generation as some other shows she won’t name do.

“Especially in such a capitalistic culture that we have right now, it's really important that we humanize the people who are actually chugging the machine along as we go,” she says. “The fact that the show does such a good job of humanizing these people and giving them depth beyond just their job or career aspirations makes me so proud, because that's hard to do in a world where career means so much to all of us.”

During the three months that they shot the show, all five cast members took a day trip to Six Flags, spent multiple evenings out at restaurants, and attended at least one escape room — the mere mention of which elicits groans from half of the cast.

“It felt like we were in a game of Resident Evil or something — even though I knew it was fake, I cannot explain it other than saying that I thought I was going to die, ” Angus says while shaking his head. “It was actually one of the most haunting things anyone has ever made me do,” Avantika adds, staring daggers through her screen at a cackling Martin, who organized that particular event. “There were people dragging us through rooms by our legs. It was diabolical!”

For Duvernay, though, the highlight of their filming experience came on the last day of filming. While the crew was filming a pickup with Victor Garber’s righteous news anchor character, the five leads snuck off to the set of the boys’ apartment to have a private moment.

“We had a bottle of champagne and some fake glasses, and we just had this private little moment where we cheered to a successful season,” he says, beaming. “But we were also toasting these relationships that we made. And I think about that all of the time.”

Not Suitable for Work is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. New episodes Tuesdays.

This story is a collaboration between PAPER and Hulu.