(Photo: Daniel Maurer)
At a q&a on Saturday at Savannah College of Art Design’s aTVfest in Atlanta, Mindy Kaling revealed that she’s long wanted the Eastbound & Down star to play Dr. Mindy Lahiri’s gay best friend. But not your stereotypical one.
“My character Mindy is like, ‘I’m nobody in New York City if I don’t have a gay best friend,'” Kaling said, describing an episode that seemed to be pretty well hashed out. “She’s like, ‘Gay men hate me, so no one will ever have anything to do with me.'”
Ike Barinholtz, who plays Morgan on Mindy Project, chimed in: “I need someone to go to brunch with and get sloppy,” Dr. Lahiri would say. But that’s not what she gets when she tries to befriend her next-door neighbor: “We wanted to cast Danny as just the darkest, most angry, fucking dirty gay man in the world,” Barinholtz told the crowd at SCADshow.
McBride’s character is “not interested in being Mindy’s friend at all,” Kaling said. In fact, he slaps her across the face at one point.
At another point, Mindy asks him to go shoe shopping. “He’s like, ‘Great,’ and he’d go to, like, Foot Locker,” Kaling said.
Or maybe Mindy would suggest Central Park. “To mug someone?” McBride would respond.
Obviously, this episode has to happen, especially given that James Franco recently told Vulture that McBride is “uncomfortable with that kind of material” — meaning a role he was going to take opposite Franco in The D Train that would’ve involved a gay sex scene. “Not that he’s homophobic, but just engaging with that himself, he would just be uncomfortable, I know,” Franco said.
But surely Barinholtz, who went up against Kenny Powers as Russian pitching ace Ivan Dochenko, could pull a few strings with McBride? “He’s off shooting a movie or something,” Barinholtz said to explain why the episode hasn’t happened. Damn you, Angry Birds!
As for other dream guest stars, Kaling and Barinholtz said they’d love to have Reese Witherspoon and Jessica Chastain. Witherspoon would be involved in a “graphic sex” scene with Barinholtz, he imagined. “We turn in a cut to the network and they say, ‘This is just sex. We can’t show it. Did we sign off on this?”