Jameela Jamil Wants to Humiliate Herself Before Her Harshest Critics Can

Jameela Jamil no longer “gives a f---” what people think about her. After years spent trying to inspire fans with positive affirmations, the British presenter and actress has turned her attention to the subject of humiliating failure on a new comedy podcast called Wrong Turns.

In this episode of The Last Laugh podcast, Jamil reveals why she has moved away from trying to inspire people to action and instead has decided to become, in her words, a kind of shameless “failure pervert.” She also breaks down how landing her role as Tahani on the NBC sitcom The Good Place had less to do with “imposter syndrome” and more with being an actual imposter, details why not knowing who Larry David was when they first met led to her officiating his second wedding, and shares a story about the time she inadvertently ended up pretending to be Priyanka Chopra at an awards ceremony.

Last fall, Jamil said goodbye to her I Weigh podcast, which was dedicated to “radical inclusivity and authentic conversations around mental health,” and relaunched the feed this spring as Wrong Turns.

“I just wanted to make something that wasn’t therapeutic,” she tells me. “I wanted to make something that wasn’t inspiring. I’m sick of the inspiration being shoved down our throats and so I wanted to make something that was anti-inspiration, pro-commiseration. Right now, we need to hear that other people have it worse. We need to feel less alone in our shame and our mortification.”

Each episode of the new podcast features Jamil and two comedian friends telling “their most humiliating stories” with no great moral or wisdom at the end. As for the significant change in style and tone from her previous show, she explains, “I think that that was a time where there was still hope left in the world and now I think we’ve turned a sharp corner towards a dumpster fire that is aflame and no one knows how to put it out.”

So instead of offering her nearly four million Instagram followers inspiration platitudes, she’s serving up relatable failure. “Sometimes when life gives you lemons, you just s--t your pants and that is the truth,” she says.

How does she get her guests to reveal their most embarrassing stories to the world? “I blackmail them with nudes,” Jamil jokes, adding, “I learned that from Rupert Murdoch.” But seriously, she adds, “I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s mostly the fact that I’m willing to get down in the dirt and humiliate myself first.”

Below is an edited excerpt from our conversation. You can listen to the whole thing by following The Last Laugh on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and be the first to hear new episodes when they are released every Wednesday.

You’ve said that you have less shame now than you used to, but when you think about somebody like Donald Trump, who is notoriously shameless, do you feel like there’s some level of shame that’s necessary?

The tagline of my last podcast was: “This is a podcast that is against shame.” And I was wrong. And I’d like to offer a mea culpa for that, because we all got a little too shameless and it caught on and then it became our identity and then we all became bastards. On the left and the right, people started behaving very inappropriately and very shamefully. And so I do think a spoonful of shame every morning is very important, but I think it should never be something that then corrupts your entire life. I have less shame about the things that are pointless for me to feel shame about. Women in particular, but I think everyone, is made to feel ashamed of so much about ourselves, and I don’t carry those. But I have willfully hung onto things that I should feel a little bit f---ing ashamed of, frankly.

What’s the difference between something that you should and shouldn’t feel ashamed about?

I think when someone profits from your shame, you shouldn’t feel f---ing ashamed of yourself. Or when you’ve been manipulated into feeling ashamed of something that you had nothing to do with. For example, a beauty standard that has been set by men who want to have sex with teenagers—grown adult men who want to have sex with teenagers have set a beauty standard that now grown women are having to pander to, and then they feel ashamed of themselves if they don’t meet the beauty standard of a barely post-pubescent child. I’m not going to feel ashamed about not succumbing to a pedophile’s beauty standard, but I will feel ashamed of some of the ways I’ve behaved publicly on the internet.

For example?

For example, just my general bolshy, classic, liberal, “you do this and you do that,” and labeling people and being quite unforgiving in my manner. And I wasn’t pro-cancel culture. I didn’t want them to lose their jobs or anything. I was just trying to say, cut it out. But I was speaking from the wound, not from the scar. And so I said it in ways that were actually just more alienating. It was completely counterproductive. And then I got super celebrated for that. I got named one of Time magazine’s 25 most influential people—alongside Donald Trump. I was on the cover of Vogue five times. I was called the feminist hero we need. And so young people looked at that and thought, that’s the correct way to behave. And I don’t stand by that. So now anywhere I can, I remind people that I was a stupid b---h and there is a better way to communicate. And actually, humor, as The Good Place demonstrates, is the fastest and most effective way to infiltrate people with something good.

I do want to talk about The Good Place, because I feel like your story of how you got on that show, your audition and just how it all worked out is sort of the opposite of this kind of failure that you talk about on the podcast. Did you audition for Tahani? Because Tahani feels like a part that was written for you, but it wasn’t, right?

It was a disastrous audition, but Mike Schur saw something in me and gave me the role of Tahani. And she was nothing like me, but he let me create her with the writers. Her name was Tess and she was annoying and sort of very un-self-aware. But I said to Mike when I got there, this woman’s very nice and so she can’t be English. You have this romanticized idea of what English people are like. There was no passive-aggression in Tahani. I was like, let’s make her a real Londoner, let’s make her passive-aggressive, let’s make her vain, let’s make her quietly aware and rude. And so he always said to me, do one your way and one my way. And then I didn’t know until the show came out which way he chose. And he chose my interpretation of Tahani because he’s a legend and isn’t an arrogant monster. And he obviously wrote that part, the writers wrote that part, I’m not trying to take credit for what they created, but they let me teach them about how vile British people really are. And I’m very proud.

Were you basing her on people from your life?

Yes. Literally my roommate, who now isn’t speaking to me. I said it was someone I know, I think I might have said someone I used to live with. But I think it was also unmistakably her. I don’t even know if I’m a good actor. I might just be a good mimic. But I stole so much of her personality and put it into this role, even the accent.

You’ve said that your experience on The Good Place wasn’t “imposter syndrome” as much as being an actual imposter because you had not acted before, but you kind of implied that you had?

I said that I’d worked on the stage in England, because it’s harder to Google that. I’d been on a technical stage in London, it was just my primary school. I was tree number three in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat.

So a lot of people cast in their first real acting role on a big show like this would feel some imposter syndrome. Did you feel that? Were you nervous once you did get the part and knew that you were going to do it?

No, because again, imposter syndrome is more when you are somewhere that you’ve earned your way to be, but you’re still convinced that you don’t belong there and you haven’t earned it and someone’s made a mistake. I literally didn’t belong there and I didn’t deserve it and Mike Schur did make a mistake. So it’s very different. So I just felt like I’d crashed a wedding. But I treat my life as though it’s a wedding I’ve crashed and I’m going to get in and have as much fun and dance as much as I can and steal some cake and kiss someone and then get thrown out. And so I’ve spent the last 20 years of my life just waiting to get thrown out. And I will be at some point, but until then I’m going to just live it up. God, I’m gonna be problematic, sorry, it’s coming, wave of problematic coming up...

Here we go.

I think there’s something bulls--t and egotistical about paying any attention to the hierarchy of this industry or any industry. There’s no such thing as people who belong. And I’ve met most of the most famous or decorated people in the world. And a lot of them are quite mediocre in person. And a lot of the work that they’ve done, that they’re great in, is also the result of 200 other people’s work that feeds into it. So I think we over-congratulate, in particular celebrities, but the people at the top, we don’t realize that they are a product of hundreds of people’s work. Even the CEO billionaire who built the company by themselves—yeah, off the exploited labor of f---ing hundreds of people or thousands of people. So I think it’s silly to think you ever belong anywhere or in any room. I think it’s self-obsessive to just be like, “Am I allowed to be in here? Just little old me?” Shut up! No one deserves to be in that room. It’s a bunch of overpaid a--holes and narcissists who are quite good sometimes.

The Good Place was a very funny show, but it’s also this very deep, philosophical show. Do you feel like the experience of doing that show made you think differently about the world or about what happens after you die or how to live your life?

I think I live my life with more potency because of the show. I think I feel very cognizant of how important it is to make the most of your time here, but also I think right now in this moment of political, sociopolitical, cultural hell that we’re in, we need a show like The Good Place. We ended in 2020 just as the world was collapsing and we had no idea what was about to happen. And the show reminds you ultimately at its core that people with huge differences from different cultures, different backgrounds, different ideologies can put their differences aside if they have a main objective to all get to a better place. It benefits the people at the top if we keep fighting each other and pointing at each other. If we work together, we could then all collectively point up top at the people who are destroying our society and then we would be able to take them down. The Good Place reminds you that you have far more in common with even the most unlikely people.

If it was on now, you think it would help things?

Yes, I do. I genuinely think it would. Because it’s the truth wrapped in dick jokes and fart jokes.

This Is the Culture War Hill Mike Schur Will Die OnTHE LAST LAUGH

Matt Wilstein, Marlow Stern

So, we were actually supposed to do this interview a few weeks ago, before you posted a Substack that got quite a lot of attention about being done getting interviewed by female journalists. I felt like I was still safe either way because I’m not a woman, but that piece obviously caused quite a stir. So I wanted to ask you about it, why you decided to write that, what prompted it, and how you have felt about the reaction?

Oh gosh, I haven’t spoken about this yet. I had a really lovely interview with this woman at the Sunday Times and she was very charming and we had such a great chat and we covered all these really interesting subjects and she just threw away most of the interview and wrote essentially a character assassination of me. And she included every minor incident or illness or accident or discrepancy or some mistake or conspiracy about me. It was like a Regina George burn book entry. And I’d rather she just wrote a piece called “I f---ing hate Jameela Jamil.”

Without interviewing you.

That would have more integrity. I don’t mind, I hate people all the time, that’s life. But putting me through the interview, throwing away stuff, twisting my words, taking things I say strategically out of context to confirm her confirmation bias about me to fit the narrative she walked into that room with having never met me—I thought to myself, how am I still doing print interviews with people? How am I still agreeing to let someone else interpret my words, my character, my being? How is this still a game that I’m willing to play when everyone has f---ed me over in all but four interviews I’ve done in 17 years? I’ve done hundreds of interviews and I’ve been misrepresented, misquoted, maligned, humiliated.

And this woman was using words that a male journalists could never get away with. At one point she asked me a very provocative, inappropriate question. And I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t really want to answer that. I don’t believe in oxygenating foolishness.” And I smiled at her and then my publicist tried to end the interview there. And I said, “No, no, no, it’s fine, we can keep going.” And she refers to that as my “claws retracting.” If a man wrote about a woman and her claws, especially when she’s politely drawing a boundary, there would be 100 think-pieces about him in the morning. There’d be a call for him to be removed from his position. But when it’s a woman perpetuating misogyny, we have this weird room for doubt that we give her, and we don’t see it as misogyny. We know internalized misogyny exists, but we don’t really understand it. So women get away with it. They get more access to me and they don’t get criticized in the same way. And I’m a real feminist. Feminism means equality. It also means if you hurt a woman, you deserve to be dragged by your f---ing pubes for it. And so I don’t think that you get a special pass for hurting another woman just because you’re a woman. I believe in equality, which is, no one hurts anyone without getting called out.

And you feel like it goes beyond this one interviewer?

It was hundreds of interviews and my heart breaking again and again and again because I had so much faith in these women. And by the way, when my piece went viral, so many of the most famous women of all time reached out to me privately to say thank you for saying something and that that was their experience.

Not publicly.

No, of course not, because they don’t want to be dragged into this but they reached out to me to say it had echoed their experience and that made me really sad. But the most potent and important part of what I wrote in this piece is the fact that why, when I’m speaking about sociopolitical issues, does my character have to be pleasing to you when I’m not talking about myself? It doesn’t matter if you find me annoying or not to believe what I’m saying about trans rights or about men’s violence against women. All these objective truths that I lay out with my platform. How weird that you need to find me palatable to digest the objective truth. It’s a way of destabilizing the conversation, right? “Is she too thin to talk about fatphobia? Is she too well to talk about disability? Is she too rich to talk about austerity?” And I think it’s disgusting that the call is coming from inside the house and I felt like fighting back. Hell hath no fury like an actress who used to be a journalist scorned.

Yeah, I mean, the reaction was pretty intense. You talked about feeling like you were held up as a feminist hero in the past. Now there were articles, I think specifically one in The Cut that basically called you anti-feminist for having this take.

Did you read that piece of s--t she wrote? It felt like a satire. It looks like she’s going out of her way to prove my point. When I first read it, I liked it thinking this is very well done satire. And then towards the end I understood, no, this is a desperate plea to cover up your own shame for participating, because you want to climb the ranks in journalism. And the fact of the matter is, I don’t need to please a man. I don’t have a job that has a man at the top. I work for myself. I’m financially stable. I’m very lucky to get to do my dream and not have to succumb to the whims of vile patriarchy. If you do, that’s on you. And how much you choose to perpetuate misogyny for profit is something you have to live with. You can’t just shut me up because what I’m saying is true. It resonated not just with other actresses but with women who feel as though they’ve been taken down by other women in their industries and in their schools. There are many decisions I could have made that could have hurt women. I could have sold diet products. I could have sold toxicity. I could have done all these things for profit. I’ve lost out on millions from choosing to back women and not hurt women. So you can’t project your own self-disgust onto me, which is what I believe that journalist did. And I think it was a shame because there were so many important conversations about violence against women and all these different things that we could have had during that that would have been so much more nourishing for the reader rather than this very indulgent, random takedown piece. And again, write the piece, say how much you hate me, that’s fine, but own it as that. Don’t pretend, don’t justify it by using my time and my thoughts. Just grow up.

In the bigger picture, what do you feel like have been the biggest misconceptions about you publicly that you would like to correct? Or what do you want people to know about you that maybe they assume otherwise?

I don’t know, man, I don’t really give a f--- what people think about me. I think I’ll always find it amusing that people think that I do all of this for attention for myself or for profit when it’s mostly negative attention you get when you go against the system. When you’re a subversive person, when you criticize people with a lot of money, or systems with a lot of money, you get punished in ways that I don’t publicize, because I don’t want to discourage anyone else. You also lose out on an insane amount of jobs and profit when you prove yourself to be someone who will fight back. And so that is something that I find sad and amusing and I think that that is a lie sold by powerful people who want to plant seeds of doubt in the public about those who are trying to make the world slightly less disgusting. And so that will always confuse me and baffle me but I know what I’m doing is right. I know I’m on the right side here. And it’s a bit like with Jane Fonda, who I’m not saying I’m as great as, but Jane Fonda, in the years of her most hardcore activism was hugely disliked, disagreed with, torn apart, character assassinations, left, right and center. And later we were able to look back at her body of work in advocacy and go, wow, she really stuck to that. And we know she was the real deal and people understand her now. And so maybe one day people will understand me, but if they don’t, f--- it, who cares, I’ll be dead. At least I lived my life with integrity.