Jameela Jamil Had Never Acted Before The Good Place

Jameela Jamil was no stranger to TV, but she’d never acted. And when she landed the role of upper-crust punching bag Tahani al-Jamil on The Good Place, she found herself learning from the best: Ted Danson and his fart noises.
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You could be forgiven for thinking, at first glance, that Jameela Jamil is the real-life version of her performatively generous, ostentatiously humanitarian The Good Place character, Tahani al-Jamil. The 31-year-old English actress soldiered through a friendless childhood punctuated by weight struggles, racist bullying, and a car accident that left her unable to walk for a year on her way to becoming a network television star. Jamil has even explained that she first developed an interest in acting when she was teaching English to foreign students in London. She liked all the pantomime, she found. But if Jameela Jamil ever actually met Tahani al-Jamil? “I would punch her in the tit,” she declares, unprompted. “One hundred percent.” (One tit, she clarifies a moment later.)

Jamil, whose Good Place gig marks her first real acting job after several years as a television host in the U.K. (“There are newborn babies who have only a tiny bit less experience than I do in acting”), is as irreverent and funny as she is eloquent. She spoke to GQ in November about Tahani’s surprising evolution on the show, her favorite thing about erotic Good Place fan fiction, and the time Ted Danson spent a whole day pretending to fart on her.


GQ: Before The Good Place, you were famous for an entirely different thing in an entirely different country. How is getting recognized on the street here in the U.S. different from getting recognized on the street in the U.K.?

Jameela Jamil: Well, I was on television seven days of the week in the U.K., so I think I used to get recognized a lot more. Also, the U.K. is a lot smaller. Here it happens less, mostly because no one gives a shit in L.A.—Jack Nicholson is behind you at the deli, or Elton John is at the buffet, or J.Lo is, like, squatting by the yogurt. And I like that. I'm a constantly inappropriate person, so it's not great to me to feel like I have to behave myself. If anything that makes me worse. Ted [Danson] literally warns journalists about me, by the way. He says I'm a loose cannon and calls me a potty mouth. Potty Mouth Jamil. It's fine. I call him Loose Lips Danson. That man cannot keep a secret for love nor money. I don't understand how we even kept the twist a secret. He was literally telling everyone.

What parts of Tahani were already built into the character when you first read the role, and what parts did you add yourself?

She was much sweeter when I first read her, and I just don't think that's true of Londoners. We're not sweet people. We're passive-aggressive people; we're quite repressed and we're secretly competitive, but we never want to show it on the outside 'cause “ambition” is a dirty word. I do think Mike [Schur, the show's creator] said he wanted someone English, preferably of a Middle Eastern background or Pakistani. There wasn't really a script available to anyone. We didn't know what the character was. We didn't know what the show was gonna be about. I didn't know if it was gonna be, like, Mike Schur's first porno. I had to sign a seven-year deal literally not knowing anything, just praying that everyone would be wearing clothes.

I’m interested in your read on Tahani, since outwardly she's this extremely good person and secretly, privately...kind of a bad person.

Here’s the great thing about Mike, and I think this runs throughout everything he's ever worked on: Mike is the master of empathy, so he can make someone so irritating and so unbearable, and yet he can explain them. You can see all of the insecurities. You can see how they became such an intolerable human. More often than not, there are sad people, not bad people. Who then do bad things.

It'd be easy for there to be sort of a schadenfreude element to her, but there isn’t.

There's no stereotype there. And I love the fact that she and Eleanor have this friendship and they kinda form a rivalry. If anything, it's kind of a sexual tension that fans seem to have picked up on between me and Eleanor.

Which is great. I've been getting erotic fan fiction written about me, which is fascinating.

What's the best one you’ve read?

Well, I just love that all of them start with the same thing, which is that we always high-five and then our fingers clasp together and then with her other hand she starts playing with my hair. That's always how it begins.

Have you talked about this with Kristen Bell?

I texted her about it. She thought it was hilarious, and I think she's all for it. Her character is openly attracted to my character throughout both seasons. So, you know, maybe season three.

Was there anything new you had to learn to do for this role?

Um, act. [laughs]

Act and understand you don't have to eat everything that's on the craft-services table—which I did at first—and burst out all of my costumes by the end of the first season. I went, like, full Pablo Escobar.

But, acting. That was it. And I was so lucky that my teachers were Ted Danson and Kristen Bell.

Do you talk to them about the craft of acting, or just observe them at work?

I just watch them act, just act opposite them. Once you get past the point of "Oh my God, that's Ted Danson, oh my God, that's Ted Danson," four months filming with them is like four years of drama school.

What was day one like for you?

All I remember is that Ted was amazing. He kept pretending to fart on me, just to make me less nervous. And while that was perfectly disgusting, it was also incredibly effective, because how weird, when Ted Danson keeps making fart noises and pointing his bottom at you.

You’ve said before that you grew up watching American sitcoms. Is there anything that surprised you or something new that you learned about American audiences since being on an American sitcom?

I was so surprised by how many critics questioned at first whether the show was too high-concept for America. I found that statement crazy and ridiculous, because you can't dumb down a nation. People are not stupid. They are able to grasp it, and I'm so glad that the ratings and the success of the show showed that.

I think you have to continue to feed as much culture into a nation as you can, because that only helps them evolve. You shouldn't try to water everything down. And Mike doesn't; it's a show where we talk about famous philosophers, Kierkegaard and Kant, and we challenge moral philosophy. We do it in quite a soft, fuzzy way, but he still never condescends to an audience. I think that's great. I'm glad someone is still fighting for the integrity of the art that goes out to the American public.

You've talked a little bit about your childhood being very different from your life today.

Yeah. And this isn't like a Victoria's Secret model going, "I'm such a nerd 'cause I wore glasses." It's not one of those. Eye roll, shut up.

So tell me about your internal monologue when you first read for the part of Tahani—whose defining characteristic, at least initially, is being dazzling and perfect in every way.

I really didn't want to go for the role because I just...I'm not someone who's usually confident in the way that I look. You know the character is supposed to be this beautiful, perfect woman who is so perfect that she makes someone as beautiful as Kristen Bell feel insecure, so that made me feel anxious. And then there are a lot of references to her looks in the show, and I think that made me uncomfortable.

I think I just leaned in to the funny of the character and put that out of my mind. But because I was so awkward and unattractive as a teenager, I think that's definitely marked me a little bit. It was very weird to play someone whose defining feature is the way she looks. But they couldn't have made me feel less like the character's focused on that on the show. They made her so three-dimensional.

On the show as Tahani, I'm leaning in to a character of someone that I know back from England, someone who was extremely similar to Tahani. I've been sort of subconsciously studying this woman that I know back in England, and then I just sort of ripped off her.

Um...who is that?!

I can't say anything, because I already know she's identified herself in the show.

Fair. One of my favorite things that's happened in the second season is Tahani and Jianyu/Jason getting together.

Oh my God, yeah. I got to kiss that face!

How was it?

Unbelievable. Also, he's the seventh person now that I've ever kissed, so I've hit lucky number seven. And I'm the seventh person that he's ever kissed, which he probably wouldn't want me to say, but I don't care. And it does count. It doesn't matter if it was on camera. Our lips touched, so it counts and he can't take that away from me.

How did you guys react to finding out that was going to happen this season?

We were both mortified. I think we just didn't actually mention it, just gave each other a daunted and horrified look. We'd already been friends at this point for a year and a half. We’re like brother and sister. It was bizarre.

He was profusely sweating the first time we had to kiss on camera. We were supposed to be holding hands and his hands were just, like, leaking on me. 'Cause no one wants to do that! Even though he’s like a male Angelina Jolie, it’s still... There's a camera right up in your face. There's people everywhere staring at you.

But you do just sort of go on with it. We wanted to do it as few times as possible, so we didn't feel like we were cheating on our other halves. Manny and D'Arcy had to make out for something like seven hours or something. That's like a full day where they had to make out all the time when they were playing lovers in season one.

You’re 5’11”—do you guys have to take any steps to deal with a height difference on camera?

The men have to stand on apple boxes sometimes while I'm acting with them, especially 'cause they put me in these insane six-inch skyscraper heels. I haven't yet been asked to stand in a ditch, but I've heard that that's what some very tall women have to do.

Do they at least let you take your heels off between takes?

I actually lie down in between takes because I'm a sloth. I'm sure that's what they wanna read in GQ. I'm a sloth with breasts. You have your title, you're welcome.

Is there anything you kinda fantasize about Tahani having to do or be subjected to in future episodes?

You know, she's a very specific breed of ridiculous as an English character, but I love her. Mike made me love her. I hated her for so long, but the more he explained her to me and to the audience, the more I've grown to feel quite fond of Tahani. I like the fact that she's becoming rebellious. I want to keep seeing beneath the very controlled, perfect veneer, 'cause you can see there's so much rage and repression in there.

When did you start to love her?

My real love for her started when she got drunk [in episode one of season two]. You see the pain and anguish in her. That's when I started to empathize with her, and started to feel like I wanted to be friends with this woman.

I'd still punch her in the tit, but I wanna be friends with her.

It does seem like the show is arriving at moment when we’re all desperate for escapism in entertainment. Is that something you guys talk about on set?

The show being about morality couldn't be more perfectly timed, under the current presidential administration and in this time where there's a lot of people being called out quite rightly for their behavior. The show sort of engages with everything and nothing at the same time.

It's not something we discuss, but it's definitely something I notice from the way that people talk to me when they stop me in supermarkets. They always say, "We love your show. We watch it just before bed because it makes us feel better about the world."

What joke made you laugh the hardest when you read it in the script?

The child in me really loved Jianyu's “bud hole.” And the other one is another Jianyu line—when Eleanor interrupts the wedding and she's like, "I hate to be the bearer of bad news," and he stops her and patronizingly says, "I think you mean the bad news bear," we had to do, like, 40 takes of that. I laughed every time he said it.