Jameela Jamil: ‘The Good Place’ and ‘Wrong Turns’
The Last Laugh
The Daily Beast
4.6 • 661 Ratings
🗓️ 16 July 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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, 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. And, for the first time, Jamil addresses the backlash she received for declaring that she no longer plans to sit for written interviews with female journalists.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is The Last Laugh. |
| 0:05.8 | I'm Matt Wilstein from The Daily Beast, and I am so excited to have as my guest on this |
| 0:10.5 | week's show, a hilarious and talented actress you probably know as Tahani from The Good |
| 0:15.6 | Place. |
| 0:16.5 | Her new podcast, which I have been loving, by the way, is called Wrong Turns. |
| 0:42.5 | Jamila Jamil, welcome to The Last Laugh. Hello, how are you? So good to have you here. Very good to be here. Thank you very much. Yeah, I feel like you've been on this sort of big press tour for the Pixar movie, Ilio, and your new podcast. So how are you holding up? Good, really good. I only take work I love, and so I'm always really happy to talk about it. |
| 0:50.2 | I sometimes turn down better opportunities in life because I know it's going to be a fucking miserable experience that I will hate talking about, and I hate all the people who are just because of the press, you're dreading the part where you have to talk about it in the press? No, I'm dreading having to pretend I liked the people I worked with. So I only worked for people that I like. That's a good plan. Well, Pixar is a pretty good group to work with. Yeah, and also the cast are just amazing and the whole the writing team, the animators, |
| 1:12.0 | everyone's wonderful. |
| 1:13.5 | It's everything you dreamed of more. |
| 1:15.0 | I found these photographs of me from my early 20s, |
| 1:18.1 | like 23 years old, running around as a visitor |
| 1:20.3 | at Pixar Studios in Northern California |
| 1:22.2 | and, you know, looking at all the sketches, |
| 1:25.6 | and saying the way that anyone does. |
| 1:28.6 | You know, I'd only been an English teacher just like a year before that. |
| 1:31.7 | And the way anyone would be like, oh, God, I'd love to be in a Pixar movie one day. |
| 1:36.2 | And I think I must have just sent that out into the universe. |
| 1:39.9 | I'm not a big manifestly person. |
| 1:41.7 | I don't, I don't love all that. |
| 1:43.2 | But I must have put it into, I don't know, I'm written it into my story because then it happened 17 years later. A mere 17 years hop and a skip later. |
| 1:55.0 | Well, a lot happened in between those times. And I want to start by talking about your new podcast wrong turns. As I said, |
| 2:01.7 | I'm really enjoying it. You've had some very funny people on it, including a lot of guests we've had |
... |
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