‘I am the ghost of cancellations past’: Jameela Jamil on surviving backlash after backlash

There are many ways you might know Jameela Jamil. Chances are you recognise her from the hit Netflix series The Good Place, on which she played name-dropping socialite Tahani Al-Jamil. You might know her from roles in mega-franchises like Star Trek, Jurassic World, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Universe, or even Pitch Perfect. Maybe you recognise her as a TV host, podcaster, writer or activist. She really puts the “multi” in “multi-hyphenate”.

“I’m just having a laugh, and I don’t know what the f--- I’m doing,” Jamil – who, in April, will tour Australia with her in-conversation event, An Evening with Jameela Jamil – says of having so many “slashes”. As she often does during our Zoom chat, she tosses off the comment like a joke, but quickly follows it up with a thoughtful explanation – in this instance, citing studies that show men are more likely to apply for jobs they’re not fully qualified for, while overqualified women hesitate to put themselves forward for the same job or promotion. “I think it’s my own sort of personal activism to jump in the deep end of things I’m wholly unprepared for, the way a guy would. And just be like, ‘yeah, why not me?’”

“Why not me?” is the reason Jamil went from teaching English in her home city of London to presenting youth programs on British TV in 2008 – she was “discovered” in a bar by a producer, she told NPR. She spent the early 2010s hosting various TV and radio shows while also DJing, writing a monthly column for Company magazine, and even launching her own fashion collection with online retailer Very.

Jamil as Tahani on The Good Place, the hit sitcom on which she starred from 2016 to 2020.

When she moved to Los Angeles at age 30 in 2016, it was to further her writing ambitions, rather than acting – in fact, acting wasn’t something she’d really considered. She told Rolling Stone she only auditioned for The Good Place at the insistence of her screenwriting agents, mainly “for the story” and to meet one of her comedy heroes, show creator Michael Schur. The rest is, if not history, then certainly a Hollywood fairytale – Jamil stumbled into a debut role as a lead in what became one of the decade’s biggest critical and commercial comedy hits.

“I’m more shocked than anyone that it’s all worked out,” Jamil tells me with a wry smile. She looks comfortable through the Zoom screen, wearing a soft grey hoodie with one leg tucked up in front of her, her hair falling soft and loose, her makeup simple but stylish (another slash: she’s her own makeup artist). “It’s like I’m a crash test dummy. I’m using my whole life as an experiment… ‘How badly can this go for me? Will Hollywood actually ask me to leave?’”

It’s a kind of brazenness not often seen from women in Hollywood; as Jamil well knows, simply being perceived as “annoying” can be enough to derail an actress’s career. “Men, when they do things that are far worse than women – they’ll beat a woman up, let’s say, and we can think of countless Hollywood examples – they go away for a minute, then they come back, and they’re given this redemptive article in a men’s magazine... Whereas a woman is just a bit annoying, or doesn’t say something perfectly, or do something perfectly, or Anne Hathaway over-prepared her Oscars speech, and we cancel her over it.”

Which brings me to another thing you might know Jamil for – one of the many times she’s been “cancelled” herself. She is unashamedly outspoken and opinionated.

During our conversation, she shares her thoughts on everything from fellow celebrities (“the Imagine video felt like the beginning of the apocalypse”) to restrictive beauty standards (“that’s obedience to misogyny”), feminism (“I think [men] feel very, very alone, and I would like to be part of a shift of feminism towards men rather than away from them”), certain platform-owning billionaires (“a lot of very powerful billionaires at the moment have an undiagnosed case of cringe”) and much more. Her social media presence is a mix of humour and thoughtfulness; jokes and very real issues existing side-by-side, and sometimes together at once, in a way that can get Jamil into trouble.

Jamil never lets it stop her – although one time, it almost did. It was back in 2020, as The Good Place was finishing up, the world was locking down, and Jamil had hit the end point of a cycle she says is alarmingly common in Hollywood. “You see it with every single woman, she’s given about 18 months to two years to do well, and then she’s ripped down.”

In the late 2010s, Jamil had been doing extremely well. Alongside her work on The Good Place, she’d been picking up other gigs – mostly animation voice work and hosting – while building a huge online following with her candidness and activism. In 2018, off the back of a spur-of-the-moment Instagram post critiquing the Kardashians’ focus on weight, she launched the “I Weigh” movement, which became an online hub for open conversations about mental health and body image. In 2019, she was named one of Time’s 25 most influential people.

‘I hope to be helpful to [people], but if they don’t like me, I don’t give a shit. It’s not my problem.’

Jamil had been placed on a pedestal. By 2020, as the cycle goes, she felt she was due to be knocked down. Several things converged to create the blow: she was criticised for hosting vogueing competition show Legendary, and forced to come out as queer as a result; journalist Tracie Egan Morrissey began obsessively documenting what she alleged was Jamil’s lies about her health, going as far as suggesting Jamil has Munchausen syndrome (which Jamil absolutely dismissed); then Piers Morgan aimed his crosshairs, and hate-fuelled Twitter following, at her.

“I was just getting pile on after pile on after pile on,” Jamil says of that year. “I thought, ‘Oh God, I just want to quit this industry. I’m sick of this shit. I hate being famous.’” It was a lot to handle, and she very nearly walked away. So what kept her going? “I’m petty,” Jamil jokes. But more seriously, “I knew that the media would make an example out of me, as they do with any outspoken woman. They want to send a warning flare to other women to say, ‘Don’t be outspoken like her, otherwise this is what we’ll do to you’.”

She persisted, and rather than her career being over, she found continued success, scoring roles in franchises like Marvel (as villain Titania in She-Hulk: Attorney at Law) and Pitch Perfect spin-off series Bumper in Berlin. Jamil also launched a hit podcast, I Weigh with Jameela Jamil, which ran for four years. “I’m very proud of myself now for sticking around, because it’s proven to women that there’s life after death. I am the ghost of cancellations past.”

But surely she cares what other people think of her? Of course, she says – if they’re her very close friends, or her boyfriend (English singer/songwriter James Blake), or her dogs. But strangers? Not so much. “I hope to be helpful to [people], but if they don’t like me, I don’t give a shit. It’s not my problem. I don’t like everyone else, so why should everyone else like me?”

It also helps that Jamil’s Hollywood career happened kind of by accident – a happy accident, sure, but not one she’s invested her entire identity in. “I was perfectly happy to live as a teacher. I loved my life,” she says. “I’m here on a jolly. I know I’m here on borrowed time, and I don’t take myself at all seriously, and if it all goes away tomorrow, at least I know that my 12-year-old self will be proud of me for speaking up.”

Jamil at the Grammys with her partner, British singer-songwriter James Blake.Credit: WireImage

From where we’re sitting – me, sweating in my home office in the middle of summer, Jamil looking at piles of snow outside her window in Canada, where she’s filming a Christmas movie – there are no signs that any part of Jamil’s multi-hyphenate career is going away anytime soon.

This year she has three movies coming out: an adaptation of Emily Henry’s bestselling book People We Meet On Vacation; a Pixar movie she did voice work for called Elio; plus that Christmas movie, A Merry Little Ex-Mas, which also stars Alicia Silverstone and Melissa Joan Hart (a “surreal” experience for a Millennial like Jamil, who grew up watching them on screen).

She’s also working on a book and writing a newsletter on Substack, A Low Desire to Please, which is “my completely unfiltered thoughts, all the things that I can’t say on social media”. But she’s most excited about her new podcast Wrong Turns, which launches in May and promises to be a “really raucous” comedy podcast.

It’s a varied slate, but her projects have one thing in common. “I won’t do any projects that are about sad or stressful subjects. I’m just not interested,” Jamil says, decisively. “I’m going to continue to make sure that I take care of the things that I want to fight for, but the rest of the art that I put out is all just going to be lols… I want to be a source of hope and fun and defiant rebellion.”

Those are the vibes she’s aiming to bring to Australia in April. Across three in-conversation events in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, Jamil says audiences can expect “candour, pettiness, and fury, with a tongue in my cheek. I want it to be fun, and I want it to be funny. But I also want us to have real conversations – true, no bullshit conversations.”

It feels as though she could be summing up the conversation I’ve just had with her. When I ask Jamil for her response to being described as “one of the most compelling voices of our time”, as she is in the promo copy for her tour, it’s the most horrified she’s looked during our 45-minute chat. Her eyes widen and she hangs her head, face in her hands. “I hugely disagree. They must have confused me with someone else.”

So, not how she wants to be known then?

She raises her head again and laughs. “I would say I’m one of the most inappropriate voices of our time.”

Jameela Jamil will be in-conversation at Sydney’s State Theatre on April 26; Brisbane’s QPAC Concert Hall on April 27; and Melbourne’s Hamer Hall on April 28.

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