Entertainment
The 'Late Night' Trailer Is The Mindy Kaling & Emma Thompson Buddy Comedy We All Need
Late night TV just got a whole lot funnier thanks to Mindy Kaling and Emma Thompson. The first trailer for Late Night, Kaling's new comedy in theaters June 7, casts Thompson as Katherine Newbury, the late night host of all our dreams. Mostly, because she doing things on her terms. And why is that? Well, Katherine's about to lose her job.
When Katherine learns she's being replaced, she decides that she needs to make herself irreplaceable to the studio. And to do that, she has to make the audience love her. Luckily, she finds a partner in her new and only female writer, Molly, played by Kaling, who is just happy to be there. So happy, in fact, that she's willing to sit on a upside garbage can just to get a seat at the all male, all white writer's room table. "It's kind of comfortable, better than a chair," Molly says in the clip.
The thing is, Molly's also got something to prove, since her co-workers think she only got her job because of affirmative action. "I know what everyone thinks of me," she tells another writer, played by Hugh Dancy. "But just because I was lucky enough to get this job doesn't mean I'm stupid enough to lose it."
No, she's smart enough to tell Katherine, who everyone is afraid of, what's really wrong with her show. "You're a little old and a little white," suggestions that might not be easy to change. But with a little joke writing help from Molly, Katherine's going to learn how to be the late night host she wants to be and not the one people expect her to be.
"This is your show," Molly tells Katherine. "It's an expression of who you are." And who Molly is is someone who isn't afraid to fight for what she wants, which makes her the perfect person for Katherine to have by her side as she attempts to make a comeback.
"I need you Molly. I need your pushiness and your lack of boundaries," Katherine tells her. "You love me," Molly says, despite Katherine swearing she definitely did not say anything of the sort. "I mean, not in those words." Sure, it's not quite Jerry Maguire's "You complete me" speech, but it'll do.
This is definitely the workplace buddy comedy you didn't know you needed, but now you won't stop thinking about this film, which marks the feature directorial debut of Nisha Ganatra, until it finally hits theaters this summer. A lot of it has to do with its stars, which is something Kaling definitely thought a lot about.
In a 2016 interview with Good Morning America, Kaling explained that she wrote the role of Katherine with Thompson in mind for the best reason.
"I just thought, I love Emma Thompson, I want to see more of her, and I just wrote her this part in a movie," Kaling said. "I sent it to her thinking like, 'okay, well, I’ll never hear from her.' And then she wrote me and was like, I love this, let’s do it — and so now we’re doing it.”
And the rest, as they say, will hopefully be late night history.