AVC: That was the first episode where you had a speaking part, right?
MK: Yes.
AVC: How did that come about?
MK: It's funny, I got in trouble when I gave an interview with a kind of not-accurate description, and Greg thinks he sounds kind of racist or something, for saying he needed a minority to slap Steve, and he picked me. But I think there needed to be, at some point, because in that episode, [Steve Carell's character] Michael Scott does his own version of Diversity Day, and it goes terribly wrong. The culminating point is, he needs to get slapped across the face, and Greg wanted a kind of shy character that you didn't know much about, except that she was ethnic, to kind of wander in, really pissed off. I'm actually characterizing this the exactly same way, just longer and in more flowery language. But yeah, it was last-minute. [Writer-actor] B.J. Novak had already turned in the script, and then that was a change that Greg made, to make it be this big slap. There weren't that many female characters on the show, so he just let me do it.
AVC: It all seems out of character for Kelly now.
MK: Yeah, it seems weird now. So much in that first season seems so different than how she is now—the way she dresses, and everything else. The way I dressed that first season, you would have maybe assumed that English was not my first language, and that I was 63 years old. I don't think that would have been too far off.
AVC: What would you assume, looking at Kelly now?
MK: A chubby Paris Hilton-y aesthetic is what she's going for now, I think.
AVC: How much input do you have into the wardrobe?
MK: Not that much. They have their own thing going. Carey Bennett, our costume designer, has this incredibly difficult job of making us look like we work in a workplace, but also, the costumes are kind of hilarious. They, in themselves, are kind of jokes. Like, Rainn Wilson's wardrobe is like a fucking routine, it's fucking hilarious when you look at it. So they do their thing, and if it's just a little over the top, then we can say something, but I usually have no complaints.
AVC: When do you think Kelly came into her own as a character?
MK: I think in "Valentine's Day," in season two, when she had hooked up with Ryan, and you get to see her. When Jim asked her, "Hey, how are you?" and she goes on for a page and a half of dialogue about what happened to her the day before, I really felt like I had an idea of what Kelly was about.
AVC: We were watching an episode the other night with some friends who hadn't seen The Office before, and it was the one where Jim gets moved over by Kelly's desk.
MK: "The Carpet," yeah.
AVC: And there's a moment of dialogue there where you just seem to be stringing words together at random. Am I wrong?
MK: That's Paul Lieberstein's episode, where she's, I think, describing her favorite things. That's what it seems like. That's a wonderful bit of monologue that Paul wrote. What's funny is that with Kelly, I feel like we share this one trait, in that scene in particular, which is that when I was a kid, I would always write down lists of my favorite things and keep them in my wallet, just in case someone ever needed to know what my 10 favorite foods were, or my 10 favorite actors. That's sort of like that characteristic of Kelly. Jim is there now, so because they don't know each other all that well, she's just going to list all of her favorite things to him so he can really concisely know everything about her.
AVC: As a writer, who are you most enthusiastic about writing for?
MK: I love writing for Pam, because she doesn't get a lot of huge jokes or anything, but she's very passive-aggressive, and I think writing that is very fun. She's also very likeable. I think that's very fun to write. I think everyone will pick their own favorite character to love. Everyone loves writing for Creed and Toby, because Creed can be just non sequiturs, and in a way, it's pretty easy. But I think writing for Michael Scott is pretty amazing. A lot of times, we'll write him too stupid, and some people will be like, "He's not Homer." He wouldn't walk into the NAACP Awards and say something horribly racist. But that is fun to figure out with the other writers. That's the most fun, when we get to dissect just how stupid he is, and so forth. He's fun to group-write. My God, Michael Scott is the most fun to write in a room.
AVC: How much backstory do you have, as far as the show's bible goes? It seems like we get little bits of information here and there, each one sadder than the last. Is there a storehouse of Michael Scott facts that you draw on?
MK: No, there isn't, actually, and I think that's kind of deliberate on Greg's part. He has this big thing about not ever specifying whether characters went to college, because he thinks that the minute you say that someone went to a college—except for Andy Bernard, who went to Cornell—people can judge the character in different ways. I don't even know if Greg knows all that much about Michael Scott. It's funny, it's almost the opposite of what I read about J.D. Salinger. He has just volumes and volumes of backstory for the Glass family, and all these other adventures that they go on, and all their histories. Greg, I don't think he thinks about their histories so much as the possibilities of what they might do in the future. I don't really know. We talk about Michael's mother a lot, because he seems like the kind of character that would have some kind of mother issue. But right now, someone could make a convincing argument that he has a hot mom who was really young when she had him, or you could make the argument that he has 70-year-old parents, and they had him late.
AVC: Some of the characters that are a little quieter must be tougher to write for. There are characters on that show we know so well, but only from little tiny details.
MK: There's such a big cast that I think there's often the trap where you're up late, you have to write an episode, and you haven't given Meredith a line, or Stanley a line, and you're not being really careful about it and not artful. Meredith's line will just be, "Well, I'll get my bottle of Jack Daniels." Meredith's a drunk, and to hell with it. I think that you really have to resist that temptation. That's a really multi-cam, crappy way to write, but we've all done it on the show. Greg is really honest about not making our characters just have their one little thing. In my opinion, it's as lame as a catchphrase.
AVC: What do you do when you aren't on camera, or on camera but not involved in a scene? You have a blog, right?
MK: Yeah, the shopping blog. Me and a bunch of other comedy writers basically are contributors, but it's my blog. It's called "Things I've Bought That I Love." Actually, I really love shopping. It's one of my big hobbies, and other than that, I'm kind of the big napper of the writing staff. I sleep a lot. Between the blogging and the napping, that's usually what I'm doing when I'm not on camera.
AVC: You were asked to write for Saturday Night Live, right? Did you end up doing anything for them? What happened there?
MK: I had auditioned last fall—just before the season started, I came out to audition. They didn't offer me a part, but the audition went pretty well, and that night, they were like, "Do you want to come write for the show?" Greg used to write for SNL, and he had known that being on SNL was my great dream. He said, "Listen. If you get cast on the show, I'll let you break your contract and go do it, but if they ask you to write, I can't, because you have a job writing here, plus you're on the show. So I'm not going to let you leave the show so you can go be in New York." At that time, I missed New York so badly. I hated L.A. for a long time, and I wanted to leave it. I had these fantasies of going to SNL and falling in love with some writer on SNL, of getting married and living in New York. That was really heartbreaking to have to turn down, but then I got to guest-write in the spring.
AVC: And that went well?
MK: I really loved it. I only got in one character in one little bit the entire time I was there, but it was such a fun experience.
AVC: How is L.A. treating you now?
MK: Now it's great. When you have a little disposable income, L.A. is a really great place to live. I have more friends now too, and a boyfriend. That's definitely made it a little easier.
AVC: Did you encounter the usual sort of "East Coast person going to the West Coast" problems?
MK: Yeah, and it's so funny you say it that way, because when you're that person, you are so insufferable, and you have no idea. And I was. One, because I was miserable, and nobody liked to be around a miserable person, and two, everything that I thought was so profound, everyone had already dealt with.
AVC: What, for instance?
MK: First, whenever I wanted to talk to anyone on the East Coast, it was way too late. Living three hours behind was one thing I complained about. The other thing, of course, was just that there were no seasons. I would complain about that too. Just tons of complaining, man, early on. I can't believe I'm still friends with the people I was friends with when I first started here.
AVC: Is Kelly the first major female Indian-American character on American television?
MK: Parminder Nagra plays a character on ER, I've been told, but I've never seen it.
AVC: Is that show still actually on the air?
MK: I haven't seen ER in about 10 years, but there's something about ER that I like, which I kind of hope happens with The Office, which is the way that the characters are recycled out and new characters came on. At the beginning, no one cared about the Noah Wyle character, but by season eight, he was a huge star on the show. I feel like that's what we can do with The Office. As John Krasinski goes on to do Ocean's 15 or whatever he's going to star in, we can cycle in some interesting new young actors, and a new boss. My dream is that when Steve leaves the show, we could have Amy Poehler come on as the boss. I think Amy's flawless. I have this fantasy that we'll get this female boss, and at the beginning, she'll seem totally normal and what a relief, and then we'll find out that there's lots of different horrible, crazy kinds of bosses. Or Kathy Bates or something. How funny would that be?
AVC: So there's a real possibility of major characters leaving, then? Is that something you guys have planned on, or do you have contingency plans in case that happens?
MK: This is just the way we'll talk about it idly. Our cast is so talented right now, they're so good that I can't imagine after their contracts are up, they're going to do this for years and years. If the show does well, it would be great if it went on for years and years.
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