Details You Should Know About Mindy Kaling And BJ Novak's Relationship

If you're a fan of The Office, then you're already aware of Kelly and Ryan's on-again, off-again relationship which often dominated the Dunder Mifflin office. Surprisingly, the on-screen couples often mirrored the relationship between the actors who portrayed them. As it turned out, Mindy Kaling and BJ Novak also inconsistently dated off-screen during the show's run, seemingly interweaving their own relationship into the lives of their fictional counterparts.

One running joke in the show that happened to align with real life is that neither Novak nor Kaling knew whether they were actually dating or not. "We were never really dating, we were never really not dating," Novak told Vulture in a 2012 interview. "We didn't know. No one knew. All you'd know for sure is that you'd always find one of us next to the other, even if we weren't getting along." 

Novak described Kelly and Ryan's escapades as "sort of expressive of the relationship that we were in," and that in real life "I think we just essentially grew up and it became more of a transition" into actually dating.

Mindy Kaling has a more solid viewpoint of the beginning of their relationship, telling Vulture that the pair "kind of fell in love" during the first season of The Office "and then dated on and off for a couple of years." You'd think that this unpredictable relationship would make their time on the show awkward, especially since they were also writers on the show, but it actually turned out to be quite the opposite. The pair ultimately became best friends. "Like, real best friends," Kaling emphasized. "It's the kind of friendship you have when you are embedded with someone, that you can only get by putting in that insane amount of time with people."

They spent so much time together that B.J. Novak earned a pretty special role in Kaling's life. "The truth is B.J. is so much like family now than a platonic friend," the actor told Good Housekeeping in 2019. "He's the godfather to my daughter, he comes over like once a week. Sometimes he'll come over just to hang out with her." Kaling maintains that while they're not exclusively an item, the closeness remains the same. 

"It isn't the thing that people sometimes think it is," the actress said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning (via Insider). "He's really part of my family now, which is great. Even though that's less of a sexy characterization of our relationship, I think it's a deeper and closer one."