Turns out, promoting a comedy is as fun as it looks.
“What’s nice about this, and I haven’t had so many experiences of this before, is that it’s a really fun show and I’m playing someone playful,” Ella Hunt says, sitting barefoot and crossed-legged on a couch. “I don’t have some kind of moral to hammer home or anything, so it feels lighter than I’m used to.”
Hunt stars in “Not Suitable for Work,” a new Hulu comedy from Mindy Kaling that follows two groups of roommates, all trying to figure it out in their first jobs in New York City. Hunt plays AJ, a Bostonian who is trying to make it in the world of finance.
The 28-year-old was shooting a film in Canada when she first heard about the show. She’d been on several back-to-back night shoots and describes reading the initial pitch as a kind of “fever dream.” She didn’t have much time to prepare before sending in a tape, which she thinks worked to her advantage.
“I was laissez faire about it in a way that I rarely am. And I think that that translated well,” she says. “I just was in a kind of don’t give a f–k, playful place, in the best way. I cared about doing a good job, but I felt easy about it, maybe partly because I hadn’t dived into the script in the way that sometimes I would.”
Ella Hunt
Lexie Moreland/WWD
Once she got more in the specifics of AJ, it became clear to her that she was going to like playing this character.
“She is at the center of this love triangle in the show, but she’s intense and quirky and weird and a workaholic and not your kind of typical leading lady, and kind of Nora Ephron-esque in a way that just really appealed to me,” she says.
Hunt had been working steadily since breaking out in the 2018 film “Anna and the Apocalypse” and the Apple series “Dickinson,” in projects like period drama “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” the “Horizon” films and the SNL drama “Saturday Night,” after which she embarked on a bit of a break.
“It wasn’t easy to intentionally not work, but coming out of ‘Saturday Night’ and coming into a period where I knew I wanted to be working on music, I knew I wanted the next project to feel like a strategic step forward and something different from what I had done. I just intentionally said ‘no’ to things and waited for something exciting to come,” she says. “Lots of people pretty early on in my career had said to me that it’s less about the ‘yes’es and more about what you say ‘no’ to. But this was the first period where that was the experience for me.”
Ella Hunt
Lexie Moreland/WWD
The Brit has lived in New York since she relocated to shoot “Dickinson,” and shooting “Not Suitable for Work” gave her a dose of nostalgia for her own experience of being fresh to the city.
“At the time you feel pretty mighty, don’t you? It’s that juxtaposition of fear and invincibility. It’s a really ripe combo,” she says. “I think that period of time when you’re in your early 20s and you’re nothing but ambition and expectation and the way that expectations can meet reality and the way that what isn’t anticipated often ends up being the juiciest, it’s a joy to play — and it’s such a unique period. And I think especially arriving in a place like New York, it just makes for great TV.
“Making this show and being one of the older cast members gave me the opportunity to smile at my eagerness and naivete coming into New York as a 20-year-old and shooting that show,” she adds. “I still feel so grateful and giddy to be on a film set, but I think I feel a whole lot more grounded now than I used to. And even in situations like [doing press], I feel like I have a whole lot less to prove. Not necessarily because I’ve proved it, but just because there’s only so much proving yourself you can do.”
One of the fruits of that realization is that Hunt is about to release her first album, “Blindspot,” on Friday. The music is about grief in many forms, including the loss of her half sister Emily, who passed in June 2023.
“With that I felt a massive shift in my life. It was like an atomic bond in my life. But I think if there is a silver lining, it’s that it’s given me a kind of looseness and a ‘don’t give a f–k in a good way’ attitude that I think was very freeing as a musician,” she says. “I’m very aware, as a person that consumes culture, how weird it can be when actors put out a music project, and that it can sometimes feel contrived or like a side project. I’ve been playing music since I was a kid and thinking about or trying to make an album for 10 years. And so I’m trying now, three years into the process, to just embrace that I do spin these different plates and that that’s probably going to take time for people to acclimate to. And maybe there’ll be facets of my artistry that some people just don’t care about or aren’t interested in. And that’s OK.”
The album and show release days apart from one another, which was not by design. But it’s another life event that has given Hunt some much-needed reflection.
“We had a crazy moment while we were shooting this season, while I played a residency at the Café Carlyle. We were shooting in Central Park that week and our trailers were parked right outside the Carlyle, where these posters of me for the shows were,” she says. “It was a real ‘pinch me, I’m spinning all the plates at the same time and it’s working’ moment.”
