Jameela's Good Place

As a T4 presenter, her sardonic wit used to make Sunday hangovers bearable. Now, Jameela Jamil is using her new role as a US comedy queen to kick-start a body positivity movement.

- Lucy Pavia

‘What you’re trying to say is, “What the fuck am I doing here?”’ says Jameela Jamil, with a laugh down the phone from LA. I’ve been scrambling around for a tactful way of saying how surprising it was to see the British presenter and DJ pop up all of a sudden on an American sitcom. And not just any sitcom, Parks And Recreation creator Michael Schur’s The Good Place, one of the smartest and buzziest comedies to come out of the US in years.

Jamil assumes every other actress in LA with the casting call requirement – a British woman of Pakistani descent – ‘must have died’ when her manager sent her to audition for the role of brilliant-awful socialite Tahani in The Good Place. A year earlier, she had left London after a breast-cancer scare gave her the push she needed to quit her Radio 1 job and relocate to Hollywood to pursue a long-held ambition of comedy writing – ‘so I would know that by the time I was 30, I had grabbed life by its balls’.

With no acting experience, she thought the audition would be, at best, an interesting experience and an opportunity to meet Schur, a comedy writing legend. Schur had different ideas and signed Jamil up to a seven-year contract. ‘You don’t presume that life could be so ridiculous that you would start a new career at 30 years old… as an actress,’ she says, incredulously.