Mindy Kaling’s Not Suitable for Work Cast Hits Chemisty Fast

Not Suitable – In a chaotic video call after months of filming, Ella Hunt, Avantika, Nicholas Duvernay, Jack Martin, and Will Angus talk about the instant chemistry that powered Mindy Kaling’s debut Hulu comedy. The show follows five 20-somethings in Murray Hill as they ente

When the call starts, it doesn’t feel like a promo interview. It feels like five friends slipping back into the same rhythm they had on set.

As soon as Ella Hunt. Avantika. Nicholas Duvernay. Jack Martin and Will Angus join a mid-afternoon Sunday video call together. the conversation barrels forward in parallel. Belated birthdays get celebrated midstream. Inside jokes take over the screen. The kind of chaos that usually belongs to people who’ve known each other forever arrives anyway—because for them. that’s basically what it is. even though they were strangers a year ago.

“Do you remember those fuck-ass white cowboy boots?!” Avantika asks Duvernay, laughing as she says it. He can’t help himself. “Yeah, I’m never wearing those ever again.”

The show they’re talking about—Not Suitable for Work. Hulu’s new coming-of-age comedy created by sitcom veteran Mindy Kaling—turns that feeling into its own premise. Set in Murray Hill. “Manhattan’s most notorious dwelling for fresh-out-of-college finance bros. ” the series follows a group of five 20-somethings as they enter the workforce. The punchline is built into the stakes: they’re stepping into jobs that carry big expectations. but they realize how little they actually know about work. life. and what it means to balance the two.

It’s also a format the cast clearly knows well: ensemble-led comedies where the premise is familiar. New Girl, Girls, and even Kaling’s own The Mindy Project and The Sex Lives of College Girls all leaned into what works when you trust the audience to recognize the shape of the story.

As Avantika puts it, that familiarity is part of why viewers will keep watching.

“Mindy does ‘easy show’ really well,” she explains. “And by ‘easy,’ I mean, ‘I am sitting on my couch, and I need to put something on and feel good,’” adding that she thinks the difference is that the characters are “well thought-out and not just surface level.”

The debut season runs for nine episodes, and each of the ensemble leads approaches their career with wildly different results. Hunt’s character, AJ Pascarelli—an ambitious, high-strung newcomer—lands an entry-level job at an investment bank. She immediately starts struggling to get ahead, drawing the ire of an overbearing boss played by Insecure’s Jay Ellis.

In a different kind of show, that relationship might have been built for dramatic intensity. Here, it becomes fuel for the funniest scenes, as AJ keeps going above and beyond to impress her boss—often to her own detriment.

Hunt remembers reading early scripts with a kind of relief that turns into a grin.

“I remember that I got sent scripts for the first three episodes, and by the end of reading them, I was cry-laughing,” she says. “I was immediately struck by how legitimately funny it was.”

That humor wasn’t just on the page. The cast credits the chemistry for making the ensemble feel inevitable.

Duvernay says it was immediate. “From day one of meeting these people, they were all just so magnetic in their own way, and it is perfect casting all around.”

Shooting began in September. For the actors, that matters because it wasn’t a slow-burn bond. It was, as the group keeps repeating in different ways, an instant match.

Martin, who plays Josh Teitelbaum, says the character could have been designed to be disliked. Josh is the entitled son of a billionaire media mogul; he starts the season by getting a job at the prestigious news program his dad owns because of his last name. despite being initially rejected. But Martin says he finds something workable in the mess.

“In a lot of my favorite shows. the characters are all the worst people of all time. ” Martin says. naming Breaking Bad and The Sopranos. “I felt like. if all of those other all-time-great actors can be on the side of those characters that are. on the scale of things. way worse than Josh. then maybe I could figure something out with him.”.

Angus plays Davis Beau Bradley Barrett III—an aspiring investment banker whose name and job are clearly poking fun at the frat-boy energy that dominates Murray Hill. Yet Angus leans into the character’s softness instead. He describes Davis as a loveable hopeless romantic trying—and more often than not. failing—to find someone else to adore.

For Angus, this series is also a first: Not Suitable for Work marks his major entrance into scripted television. He previously came up through TikTok and the online sketch comedy group Almost Friday.

“I was very nervous. I definitely was dealing with a little bit of imposter syndrome. ” he says about landing the role. “And it’s very different — if I do a sketch or a character that fully bombs. I can just throw it away and then never come back to it. Here, you don’t just get to start over from the beginning. But it’s made easier because the writers are so on top of everything. They have such a singular vision for the character that it made it very easy to walk into this part.”.

On-screen, Angus and Martin are best friends and roommates. In real life during the three months they shot in New York, they lived together in a Williamsburg apartment. Martin jokes that they went all-in.

“You could say that we were fully method,” Martin says. Angus immediately joins in: “We fully plan to do it again — we’ve been trying to convince Nick to do triple bunk beds with us in Brooklyn.”

Hunt and Avantika also play roommates, but they didn’t cohabitate while filming. Avantika says they didn’t need to. She and Hunt hit it off during a chemistry test in Los Angeles, and they stayed friends through the shoot.

“You always feel an instant chemistry with one person when you’re in a chemistry read,” Avantika explains, “but you never want to say it out loud because sometimes that’s not the person they pick for the part.”

In her case, she says the spark was with Ella. Once both were cast, they moved to New York, grabbed pho together, and went to an art gallery that was opening.

Hunt points to that art gallery date as the moment they felt immediately in character.

“I invited Avantika to this art show where there were maybe one or two people there that I knew,” Hunt says with a laugh. “Sure enough, we get there, and Avantika knows like 50 percent of the room.”

“It’s so deeply AJ and Abby of us,” she adds.

Avantika plays Abby Chilukuri, an assistant to a demanding fashion stylist played by a hilarious Constance Wu. Abby spends much of her screen time trying to keep her boss happy while also navigating a potential romance with one of her famous clients—Harry Richardson.

Avantika says she counts Not Suitable for Work as a career highlight partly because of Kaling’s role in the project.

“She was always at the top of my bucket list of people I wanted to work with,” Avantika says. “Because she was always there championing brown women in her shows, and doing them so much justice as complicated characters.”

Even with “this creative empire,” she says Kaling approaches set life with “such humility and collaboration.”

Duvernay echoes the team vibe—and he also remembers his own uncertainty before he took the role.

“I watched so many comedies growing up and just thought, ‘Wow, these people are funny, am I funny enough to be in a comedy?’” Duvernay says. “When I got it, I was still in my head, wondering if this was gonna work.”

He recalls Kaling spotting the doubt. “Mindy noticed that and was just like. ‘Hey. relax. you’re the guy.’ Having someone like that on set. who’s so tried and true and is such a veteran in a league of her own. you have both this need to please her and this confidence that she picked you for a reason.”.

Then, as if it’s part of how the cast keeps chemistry alive even in interviews, he adds something personal: “she’s also got the best fashion sense I think I’ve ever seen on another human being.”

Martin plays along immediately, saying, “I actually think Nick has the best fashion sense I’ve ever seen on a person,” while Duvernay’s earlier cowboy boots return as a running bit.

“You literally have to keep wearing them,” Avantika says between giggles.

For Duvernay, the character Kel Washington sits close to his own background. Both dropped out of school to pursue acting, and both learned the same hard lesson quickly: without a part-time job, you go broke.

Where Kel finds work as an English teacher, Duvernay worked increasingly odd part-time gigs in L.A. to survive as an actor—driving delivery, and working a graveyard shift at a bakery making muffins overnight for the mornings.

He describes the show as a “mindblur,” because he’s playing a version of himself chasing dreams while also knowing what comes next.

“I’m doing what I’m doing now because I followed my dreams to do it,” he says. “But now I’m playing the kid who’s trying to follow his dreams. so I kind of see it from almost an older brother perspective. I just wanna hug him and say. ‘It’s all gonna work out … you’re broke. but keep at it and one day you’ll be on a show and Mindy Kaling will be your boss.’”.

The cast also had to build confidence in costume.

Angus jokes he had no idea what to expect on set. “I had no clue what the hell was going on in any of my work scenes.”

Hunt points to her character’s outfits as a key to finding that Wall Street confidence.

“I had so much fun cosplaying an investment banker out and about in Hudson Yards, to be honest,” she says. “My costumes were a lot of ties. a lot of waistcoats. a lot of Annie Hall nods. and I’d go out to get lunch. and I’d see businesswomen kind of checking me out — it felt like I was a fully different person.”.

Even when the actors weren’t connected directly to their characters’ experiences, they say they understood the mindset: young people trying to balance work and life in a culture that doesn’t encourage a healthy relationship with a job.

Martin ties it to generational reality. “The median homeowner age is, what, 59 now?” he says. “The Gen Z experience is that everyone is roommates, and they meet by being roommates for this long. Work is taking over your life, and you’re trying to progress and that’s not even really working. That is what the show communicates so well.”.

Vandanapu adds that NSFW gets the workforce transition right without turning it into a stereotype parade.

“Especially in such a capitalistic culture that we have right now. it’s really important that we humanize the people who are actually chugging the machine along as we go. ” she says. “The fact that the show does such a good job of humanizing these people and giving them depth beyond just their job or career aspirations makes me so proud. because that’s hard to do in a world where career means so much to all of us.”.

During filming, the group spent real time together in New York—day trips to Six Flags, multiple evenings out at restaurants, and at least one escape room.

That last activity gets the loudest groans. Even thinking about it brings it back.

Angus describes it with the kind of disbelief that makes it sound worse than it was. “It felt like we were in a game of Resident Evil or something — even though I knew it was fake, I cannot explain it other than saying that I thought I was going to die,” he says while shaking his head.

Avantika, still reacting to the memory, puts it bluntly. “It was actually one of the most haunting things anyone has ever made me do. ” she says. staring daggers through her screen at Martin. who organized that particular event. “There were people dragging us through rooms by our legs. It was diabolical!”.

Duvernay’s highlight comes on the last day of filming. While the crew filmed a pickup with Victor Garber’s righteous news anchor character, the five leads slipped off to the set of the boys’ apartment to have a private moment.

“We had a bottle of champagne and some fake glasses, and we just had this private little moment where we cheered to a successful season,” Duvernay says, beaming. “But we were also toasting these relationships that we made. And I think about that all of the time.”

Not Suitable for Work is now streaming on Hulu and Disney+. New episodes drop Tuesdays.

If the show’s premise is five strangers learning how work rewires their lives, the cast seems to be describing the inverse experience—five strangers finding each other quickly enough to make the chaos feel effortless.

Not Suitable for Work Mindy Kaling Hulu Disney+ Ella Hunt Avantika Nicholas Duvernay Jack Martin Will Angus Murray Hill coming-of-age comedy Jay Ellis Constance Wu ensemble sitcom