In ELLE.com’s recurring feature Character Study, we ask the creators behind our favorite shows to go deep about what went into creating their memorable characters: the original idea behind them, how they were tailored to the actor, and elements of them we might not see on the screen.
Mindy Kaling, Ike Barinholtz, David Stassen, and Elaine Ko knew what they were doing when they created Isla Gordon, the main character in their new Netflix series Running Point. Isla, the recently appointed president of a Los Angeles NBA team, is confident, sometimes confused, relatable, a little bit like Lakers owner and president Jeanie Buss (who’s an executive producer and a light inspiration) with a bit of Kate Hudson, who plays her, mixed in.
Isla, the only daughter in the family that owns the Los Angeles Waves, was raised in the world of basketball. After a wayward youth, she finds herself in a largely inconsequential role in the family enterprise, until she’s unexpectedly given the team to run. ELLE.com spoke with Kaling, Barinholtz, and Stassen about Hudson’s experience within her own dynasty, how tabloid coverage of young actresses shaped their approach to Isla, and why her family is so very Scottish.
How did you model Isla after Jeanie?
Mindy Kaling: This woman has lived basically 10 lives of teammanship. She’s had such an interesting and cinematic life. But also, she’s a living person. We want to protect her. We want to protect ourselves, frankly. So, we use her as an inspiration, but it is not a direct one-to-one at all for her life. Actually, creatively that’s our preference because then we don’t have to worry about sticking to the facts. There’s obviously some parallels with her own life. But we’re obsessed with her and she’s given us such good material.
Ike Barinholtz: And as far as just making the show a true comedy, we wanted to be able to have the freedom to make our characters be very flawed and do things that I don’t think other actual professional basketball teams would welcome comparisons to. We made the decision to be inspired by Jeanie and her life, but tried to create our own little world where we can do whatever we want and not worry about people saying, “Is that me?”
When Kate was cast, were there things you wanted in the character that were specific to her?
Kaling: It was such a gift for us that Kate is in this role, to have a woman who was from an L.A. dynasty play a character who is in an L.A. dynasty. There are certain L.A. things, references, ways of being, ways of dressing neighborhood by neighborhood that Kate just knows.
David Stassen: She literally knows Jeanie. She grew up going out with Jeanie. Jeanie took her under her wing when they were younger.
Barinholtz: When you’ve been doing this as long as Kate and you’re as good as Kate, you just have this intuition. There were a lot of times where we wrote a joke or a line and we’re like, “Okay, well, we’ll say it this way,” and Kate says it in a totally different way and it works. That’s just this weird magic thing that she has just from being her.
Kaling: So much of the comedy in the show comes from jokes about a certain kind of gilded lifestyle in L.A. and references about that, how foolish it can be, how glamorous it can be. Kate understands it inherently, and so it’s incredibly gratifying as writers.
Where would you describe her being personally and professionally at the beginning of the pilot?
Stassen: At the beginning she is someone who wants more in life but either hasn’t realized it or won’t admit it yet. There’s opportunity that comes to her in the beginning activates that want that she’s maybe been suppressing.
Kaling: Everyone is so relieved that she’s not an embarrassment to the family anymore, that she has relative stability with her fiancé, and nobody cares that possibly she has any desires other than that. She does have ambitions and she is unfulfilled professionally, but she also knows that she can’t blow it because they took a chance on her.
Barinholtz: That first shot we see her, she’s sitting in this little back office, mounds of paper, coworkers walking past. In that moment, you get the glimpse that she’s just accepted the fact that she’s going to be working in this small little segment away from the action.
What do you think she was like as a kid?
Kaling: I think Isla was bright and sweet as a kid, and eager to learn, and no one taught her or picked up on that. She saw her brothers getting either ignored or verbally brutalized by their family and learned, “I don’t want to piss my dad off.” With her mom, she often had to be the mom character when she was nine. She’d have to take care of her mother because her mother was dealing with her own stuff. So, it was a pretty tough childhood. And I think that it made her grow up super fast.
David, Ike, and I all came to L.A. around 2003, 2004. It’s a time that we all really remember and are inspired by for the show, which is when paparazzi was really into Paris Hilton and Nicole and Britney. We talk about that so much now because we think about how backwards everyone treated them. You’ll see these absolutely insane interviews with Nicole Richie when people are talking about her body and her behavior. I think this character is really of that time. Not that life isn’t hard for young women in Hollywood now, but it was way more overt. And I think that’s a big part of her.
Stassen: She survived it.
Do you think of fear of marriage is why she’s been engaged for so long?
Kaling: I used to never understand in TV shows this fear of commitment because I was always like, “I want to get married when I’m 24 and have six kids.” I was that person. And then now that I’m an unmarried woman in my forties, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to have to love someone and take on them and their family when I have a career that I love.
It’s a really fun thing to talk about in the room because we have people who are in very healthy long-term marriages, and then me, who’s so scared of it. We want to make it feel real to professional women out there who know on some level that they want to have kids and that’s what everyone tells them they need to do. But at what cost [does that come]?
What do you think her dynamic with her brothers was like when she was a child and in her twenties?
Kaling: This is a rough family, meaning that they have access and have wealth and they had a million nannies, but there is not love and tenderness given from their parents. It’s like, “You’re on your own, kid.” The father’s a workaholic that loves his children theoretically. Before you make a show, we talk for months about what the family is like. I think Dave was the one that was like, “We knew that we wanted them to be Scottish.”
That’s why [two of them are named] Isla and Ness, instead of the typical TV names. All these things are really specific. Because he was self-made, he doesn’t suffer fools and he doesn’t have time for tenderness.
How did you develop her style?
Kaling: Kate is an executive producer on the show, and she has done so much good producing. One of the things she really took on is the way Isla looks. She worked really closely with Sophie Lopez, who styles her character on the show, but also Sal Perez, who styles everyone else on the show. Her work look, it’s professional, but also she’s like Queen Elizabeth. She peacocks in her bright colors. She’s the one in charge.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.