Television

It’s a day after ‘Bois Locker Room’ made headlines in India, and Jameela Jamil is fulminating on the phone from LA. “I can’t believe more celebrities aren’t speaking out about it, in India and outside,” says the 34-year-old actor and activist. She heard about the social media episode, a disturbing incident in which teenagers shared explicit photos of minors and discussed raping girls, after being inundated with messa­ges from her South Asian Instagram and Twitter followers. “It was being flagged for me by thousands of girls and boys because no one with influence was talking about it.”

Jamil, the half-Indian, half-Pakistani, British-born-and-raised, US-based actor, is a bona fide global celebrity and among the growing number of South Asian faces in Hollywood. “I would say I’m more of an activist than an actor,” she says. “My interest lies in changing laws and policies I don’t want to be the star. I want to be part of a bigger conversation that helps people.”

Jamil’s career has been a hybrid of various creative strands, she started as a model, then went on to radio presenting, and television. Along the way, she became an activist against diet culture, body shaming and unrealistic media standards for women. Four years ago, she had a break-out role in The Good Place, the hit TV comedy. “The success of the show surprised me,” she says. “It was a high-concept show, a comedy of philosophy. You had all these different ethnicities and the jokes and the storylines were not about our ethnicities. We were just playing people living in this world.”

Jamil says because of “cultural erasure”, she grew up with little sense of her own South Asian identity (her father is Indian, her mother Pakistani), choosing to minimise it. “It felt like the safest way to carry on in this incredibly racist moment in the UK was to try to blend in, be racially ambiguous so that people wouldn’t hurt us,” she says. “I would only ever see thin, white women with blue eyes in all mainstream media and magazines. I never saw anyone who looked like me and that gave me the explicit message that there was something wrong with me.” In her twenties, Jamil began to shed that old self, dismissing the standards she internalised from mass culture as “restrictive, reductive”. “It led me to question my own westernisation and how toxic that was. Since then I have been exploring my culture more.”

Part of her clapback has been speaking out about difficult formative experiences, including her struggle with anorexia, bullying and other health problems. In 2018, she launched “I Weigh”, an activist initiative that grew from an Instagram page. It showcases stories and advocates around issues like inclusivity, queerness and climate change. Jamil readily concedes the paradox of being a thin, successful person campaigning for body positivity or injustices she may not have personally experienced. “I understand it can be frustrating for those who aren’t being listened to, for them to see me, a privileged person, speak up,” she says. “But if I don’t do it, how will the conversation be had?… What I think I have been good at doing is amplifying other voices with my platform.”

That amplification is expanding by way of her upcoming YouTube channel which will highlight activists around the world, and a recently-launched podcast on mental health. It has, so far, featured conversations with Reese Witherspoon and Demi Lovato. “[Shame] is the root cause of most mental health problems, so I wanted to make an honest, unintimidating podcast about mental health,” says Jamil. “Hopefully, it feels like you are listening in on a very personal chat and feel less alone.”

Jamil lives in LA with her musician boyfriend James Blake and counts herself in the ranks of Mindy Kaling, Priyanka Chopra and Kumail Nanjiani, South Asians at the frontlines of a more inclusive, representative popular culture. “It’s starting to change and I’m proud to be a part of that change. But we need more,” she says. Jamil also features in the recently-released Mira, Royal Detective, an animated Disney show about an Indian girl who solves mysteries. “She doesn’t look like a Disney princess, she doesn’t have a one-inch waist, she looks like me when I was little,” says Jamil. “That sort of representation would mean so much to the next generation.”