Mindy Kaling Turned Down Her “Dream” Job at ‘Saturday Night Live’ to Stay at ‘The Office’

Mindy Kaling is opening up about the decision that almost changed her entire career. On this week’s episode of The Daily Beast’s The Last Laugh podcast, the actress and writer discussed having to turn down her “dream” job at Saturday Night Live because of her responsibilities on The Office, which filmed across the country in Los Angeles. While Kaling has since found major success, she acknowledged that turning down SNL “was really a life-changing thing,” as “the course of [her] career would have gone really differently” had she left The Office.

During her in-depth conversation with The Last Laugh‘s Matt Wilstein, Kaling discussed everything from being a “diversity hire” on The Office to her new film, Late Night, to her “childhood dream” of starring on SNL. The actress has discussed skipping out on Saturday Night Live before — she brought it up during a 2007 interview with AV Club and also mentioned it in her memoirs — but she spared no details while talking with Wilstein.

According to Kaling, “halfway through Season 2” of The Office, she was invited to audition for a cast role in SNL. “I sat down with Greg [Daniels] and I said to him, ‘It would be my dream to be a cast member on Saturday Night Live,'” she recalled. “And he’s like, ‘You have a job here, I don’t understand why you would want to leave.’ And I said, ‘I know, it’s just this is my childhood dream.'” After some back-and-forth, the two agreed that if she was cast on the sketch show, Daniels would let her out of her NBC contract.

“So I went there and I auditioned and afterwards I had heard that Lorne [Michaels] wanted to offer me a job as a writer there, but not as a performer,” continued Kaling. Michaels hinted that if she “stayed on long enough,” she could potentially “graduate to be a performer,” like Jason Sudeikis had done. “That was dangled to me, so I thought, well that’s pretty exciting,” Kaling said on The Last Laugh. “So I went back and talked to Greg about it and he said to me, ‘No, that’s not the deal we made. The deal we made is that if you get cast as a cast member you can go.'”

Kaling ultimately listened to Daniels and stayed on The Office — a move that turned her (and her character, Kelly Kapoor) into a bonafide star. “It was really a life-changing thing,” Kaling said of turning down SNL. “I think the course of my career would have gone really differently had I left The Office and done that instead.”

Listen to Mindy Kaling’s entire interview with The Last Laugh‘s Matt Wilstein here.

Where to stream Saturday Night Live

Where to stream The Office