(interviewer): If 9-year-old Jameela could see you today,
what would she say about your career trajectory?
- I think she'd just be really impressed that
I got to meet all of her favourite actors eventually.
Have a picture with them.
She was very shallow
So am I.
(laughing)
That's all I cared about when I was younger.
(theme music)
I'm Jameela Jamil
and this is a guided tour of my career and life.
I would describe my childhood
as a dumpster fire of hell and chaos.
I was born in London
but grew up around a lot of very unhappy and unwell people.
It's very difficult as a child
who doesn't really understand what's happening,
or that it isn't your fault
that other people around you are sad.
♪♪
This is one of the most defining moments of my life.
I was 17 years old,
walking down a pavement - that's a sidewalk in America -
a bee is coming down the same sidewalk.
I am terrified of bees - irrationally afraid -
so my survival instinct kicked in
and told me, "Just run into oncoming traffic."
I get hit by one car, by body flings up in the air,
at which point I get hit by another car--
(car honks outside)
There it is.
That's actually a really great sound effect.
Ran home. Didn't tell my mother
'cause I thought I'd gotten away with it, I taught I was fine,
and then, an hour later,
I must've just blacked out and...
I wasn't able to walk again for another year.
It was lonely. I was isolated.
And so, the only friends I really had
were the people I was watching on television.
It was such a formative moment.
I was just, kind of, crossing
from being a teenager into an adult.
and I needed guides,
and so I looked to the people of, mostly, American TV.
And so, I think almost, like, via osmosis,
I learned how to host and how to act
without ever having trained.
My biggest lesson was...
just to be kind and respectful towards my body
and towards my life,
and to be grateful for what I do have.
Because you never know when it can be taken away.
By the time I was fully better, I was almost 19.
First thing I did was go back to the video store
that I had already worked in.
But then, I got fired
'cause I got caught stealing a lot of ice cream.
So after that, I became a human test subject.
I would try all kinds of hair and skin stuff, makeup.
But I've had, like, dandruff for 10 years since doing that.
I worked as a secretary, as a PA.
Oh my god, I was a waitress
and I got fired on, like, my first day
because I spilled soup on an old lady.
Finally, I landed upon this advert
for teaching English as a foreign language.
So, I was, like, "That's it."
That's what I'm gonna do.
You didn't really need that many qualifications.
I lied and said I had some anyway.
That job was pivotal to my career
in so many different ways.
And it turned me into a performer.
I remember one of the more embarrassing moments
was having to teach an entire class full of Polish nuns
who were all in their late sixties and seventies,
via the art of mime
why they shouldn't pronounce "sitting" as "(beeping)".
So I was there, squatting
in front of a room full of Polish nuns...
(nuns laughing)
...pretending to take a (beep).
And I think after that, I was really just able to do anything,
'cause shame was sort of dead. Forever.
Especially when we're young, we don't know ourselves
or what we're capable of, so stay open.
My being willing to try all these different things
accidentally led me to the rest of my life.
And that wouldn't have happened
if I'd made this, like, finite plan that I had to stick to.
So, just stay flexible.
While being an English teacher,
we had this pub that we would go to, right next door,
and a man came up to me,
we started chatting, and after a while,
he said, "You'd be good on television."
And I was like, "Ugh!
No, I would never work in show business."
(laughing)
Then, he said that it was 1000 pounds a day
to work in TV and that there was this open call, nationwide,
to replace Alexa Chung.
And I was, like, "Oh!
What was that email again?"
I really wanted 1000 pounds a day. So...
I went for it.
And a week after that,
I was starting live on national television, by myself.
It was this huge youth-entertainment show.
Kind of like TRL, but if TRL went on all weekend.
It was a massive opportunity.
And it really should've gone
to someone more experienced than me.
TV was great.
I did it for, like, three years.
I learned so much, but I wanted to be goofy,
I wanted to do more comedy,
I wanted to write, I wanted to make documentaries
and I feel as though people couldn't see me
as anything other than a fashion girl.
So, I decided to try radio so that if you couldn't see me,
maybe you'd start to take me seriously as a broadcaster
and I applied for a job at Radio 1.
And I had to replace one of their big Djs, just for one day,
and it went really well
because I told a really inappropriate story.
Live, on national radio.
I really learned how to become a broadcaster there
because I no longer could rely on my looks
or what I was wearing or on my facial expression.
And you're also driving the desk.
You have the whole of the BBC at your fingertips.
You could do anything.
You could just ruin the entire network.
(chuckling)
Be willing to embarrass yourself.
Be willing to be vulnerable publicly.
Try things that you don't know how to do,
'cause you never know, you might just learn.
A doctor checked my boob, found a lump.
And I had to have a biopsy
and I had to wait a week to find out
what the results of that biopsy were.
It feels like the longest week of your life
when you're waiting for results,
and I made this, sort of, like, bucketlist,
although I call it a "(beep) it list".
When it turned out that it would actually just be
a very simple operation,
and I wasn't full cancer
and I wasn't gonna have to have chemo or anything,
I ultimately decided to move to Los Angeles
and I packed all my stuff in a bag
and I said goodbye to everyone,
I quit my job,
and I left.
I wanted to be a writer and a DJ.
I had no Visa, no contacts, no nothing.
I had a hope to just be allowed to have the space
to reinvent myself
and to find out who I am now
rather than be held forever to who I was at 22.
Once I got here, I started writing.
I wrote a pilot.
That pilot got sent by a friend
to a manager at 3 Arts
and they were also making The Good Place.
A lot of managers don't have a lot of Indians,
so I think, you know, they just, they needed one to send in.
Overly tall, annoying, English, that's me.
And I was very, very against the idea.
I had lots of very judgmental and nasty thoughts
about actors.
I thought they would all be, uh, vacuous, arseholes.
Turns out, I was the arsehole. (laughing)
You know, they'd really talked me into it by saying that
I was gonna maybe meet Mike Schur at the audition,
and as a young writer,
who better for you to meet than the king of comedy himself?
I-- It was a Friday.
Suddenly, at 9:30 pm, I get this phone call
and I pick up the phone and all of my agents -
'cause in America, you have to have like 700 agents,
managers, I don't know why -
but everyone was on the phone.
And they were like, "Congratulations!
You're an actress now!"
I was so stunned and terrified
that I had to lie down in the middle of the sidewalk,
just staring up at the stars,
and taking in the fact that, "What have I done?!
I'm not gonna be able to act and I'm gonna ruin the show
and then, England's gonna be so embarrassed of me,
and then, I'm gonna become a national disgrace.
People kept on coming up to me to ask me if I was okay,
I was, like, "Yeah, yeah, I'm just an actress,
I'm just an actress." (laughing)
And now, my life has completely changed
and it was the best thing that ever happened to me,
and I owe him everything.
Hm. (beep)
In Hollywood,
they set an insane amount of time
for hair and makeup for actresses.
Having never been an actress before,
I was not down for that.
I didn't understand why the boys were coming in 25 minutes
before we were shooting
and yet, I was expected to be there at 4:30 am.
I'm a little bit offended that you think
it's gonna take an hour and 45 minutes
for me to look presentable for camera.
That's inappropriate.
I would like the same hair and makeup time as the boys.
And I will do my own makeup,
and therefore, I was able to sleep,
and therefore, I was able to remember my lines better,
and therefore, I became a better performer.
The goal for me was to be funny,
it wasn't just to look good.
To be funny on camera opposite Ted (beeping) Danson.
(chuckles)
I really think that's such a big part of why women
are, kind of, held back as a gender,
because we are told that
we're supposed to spend more time on our appearance,
we're supposed to sleep less and eat less
and exercise too much.
The industry is something that
I think is fun to participate in,
but I moonlight as a performer.
My real goal is to shed light
on all the things I didn't understand
when I was an 11- or 12-year-old looking through the magazines,
thinking what I was seeing was real.
And so, I guess I'm a kind of Trojan Horse,
lifting back the curtain
and telling everyone all of the secrets.
We cannot deny our responsibility as an industry -
"It's all (beep)."
as to how we impact culture and society.
I'm determined to be that until they run me out of town.
In this industry, it's really important
to not burden yourself
with the responsibility to be liked and approved of
and believed by everyone.
It hasn't really happened for any woman
who's been in the spotlight in this industry, ever.
So, be yourself, be respectful,
be professional, but stand firm in what you deserve.
When I was 26,
I was on the radio,
I'd made history 'cause I got this huge job
and no woman in 60 years
had ever gotten this job on the radio,
and on the day that they were releasing hour ratings,
no one talked about mine, and I'd gained 200,000 listeners.
The media was too obsessed with the fact
that I had gained a couple of dress sizes instead.
And I snapped in a way that I had never snapped before.
We don't listen to the marginalized,
we listen to the privileged
and it's a really gross part of our society,
but it's also something that we have to acknowledge is a truth.
I then decided to use
every single interview I would ever have
to talk about feminism, eating disorders,
the weight-loss industry.
I'd had an eating disorder for pretty much my entire teens,
I wanted to try and stop the next generation of little girls
from feeling the way that I did, which is that
"I'm not good enough to even be alive in this world
if I'm not a size 0."
I Weigh is a mental-health movement
and an allyship platform.
I started it in 2018
because The Good Place wanted me to really
become more active on Instagram so I could promote the show.
So I clicked on that terrible magnifying glass,
the explore button,
and because I'm a woman of a certain age,
it just kept on sending me pictures of celebrities,
female celebrities with their weight written across their bodies.
I had PMS,
I was bored on my boyfriend's tour bus
and I just, had my Twitter in my hand,
"I weigh: my relationship and my contribution to society
and my bone disease,
and my eating disorder I've overcome
and my orgasms,
I weigh the sum of all of my (beeping) parts."
Thousands of women wrote back to me,
sending me what they weigh.
I think I really just hit upon a moment
where we were just maxed out
on being fed up of being underestimated
and forced to be valued by nothing
other than a number on a scale just because we're women.
I just started an Instagram account
that I thought would last a couple of weeks
and yet, now, 2.5 years later,
we have become no longer just about eating disorders
and about body image,
but we're now about all mental-health issues,
all marginalization,
and most importantly,
we are a place where you can come
to learn about other people.
Rather than be shamed in our society for what you don't know,
we're excited for what you want to learn.
Your work is never done.
There is always more to do,
more to learn and better that you can be.
That's why I call myself a feminist in progress,
because I feel as though I'm going to be learning
for the rest of my life.
We have to update with the times
and already, seeing how much is changing
and how much more aware we're becoming,
just in the last couple of years, shows me
that we will always have to be vulnerable
and open to criticism,
and open to learning.
We love perfection,
in this generation,
but I'm not that, and I'm just gonna stay and continue to work
on myself in my own time.
And those who like me can stay,
and those who don't, I understand.
I believe the magic of life happens in the periphery.
It's not necessarily always where you're looking
or where you're headed,
it's all the opportunities that pop up on the side
that we've been told to ignore
that we must not ignore.
Because sometimes, that's where we learn who we are
what we want,
and what we're capable of.