In HBO/Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls, created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, Amrit Kaur plays Bela, who often finds herself in sticky situations for stopping at nothing to advance her comedy writing career.
“I’m very similar,” says the 30-year-old actress, who grew up in Ontario in a Sikh family. “I think my approach to acting is: There is nothing in the human experience that isn’t in me. I’m very ambitious. I love comedy. I love fashion. I am so desperate to be liked, I am so desperate to be the most beautiful. I’m so desperate to make everyone happy. Those are things that are the cusp of Bela.”
After graduating from theater school in Toronto, Kaur felt “I hadn’t learned enough, and I went around to so many acting studios.” The search led her to Gracemoon Arts Company and its founder, Michèle Lonsdale-Smith, whom she credits for her casting in the Sex Lives series, which wrapped its second season late last year. “The four or five months before I auditioned for Sex Lives, we were working on my self-consciousness in front of the camera, my fear of looking like the person who’s losing all the time, my fear of allowing people to see my weirdo, or the eager girl who was always falling flat on her face … which allowed me, when the audition came up, to bang it out. I was like, ‘I know this person.’ And we shot it in 20 minutes.”
(Shortly after Kaur’s interview with THR, The Cut published an exposé of Lonsdale-Smith’s acting program, alleging an abusive teaching environment. Kaur declined to comment.)
Playing the part of an aspiring comic opposite co-stars Pauline Chalamet, Reneé Rapp and Alyah Chanelle Scott has inspired Kaur to try stand-up herself. “So many people on Sex Lives are stand-up comedians,” she says. “I was sharing my set throughout takes, and [a castmate] told me, ‘Amrit, it’s going to take you six years to master this, minimum.’ So I’m [still a] baby.”
Is she as tight with her fictional roommates as she appears onscreen? “[In each] episode, we have a couple of scenes where we’re all together,” says Kaur, “but the majority of the time [we’re] shooting our own individual storylines. So we’ve all created circles of friends based on those.”
She’s writing a TV show with one of those on-set friends — Ilia Isorelýs Paulino, who plays the barista Lila — called Nose and Belly. “It’s about a nose and a belly who are discovering puberty,” Amrit says. She’s also wrapped filming Me, My Mom & Sharmila, written and directed by Fawzia Mirza, in which Kaur plays a young woman who travels from Canada to Pakistan to bury her father — and opens old wounds from her relationship with her conservative mother.
Also in the pipeline is Sex Lives’ third season — now postponed amid the writers strike. In the meantime, there’s always stand-up. Kaur says she’s inspired by “people like Dave Chappelle, [who] through his comedy talks about so many important concepts. The way he reveals himself, which people think is controversial, or people think is brave … We feel ourselves thinking in similar ways, we feel relieved, and in that way, it allows humans to feel less alone.
This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
Source: Hollywood
