Mindy Kaling is looking back on a terrifying encounter with a stranger she initially believed was a huge fan of The Office.
On Monday’s episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live, the 43-year-old actress was asked by host Jimmy Kimmel if she had ever been in a “genuinely scary situation” in honor of Halloween.
Kaling went on to recall a night several years ago when she and her Office costar and pal B.J. Novak headed out for dinner in Los Angeles. At the time, Kaling was pregnant with her daughter Katherine, now 4.
“The most genuinely scary situation I’ve ever been in was when I was actually eight-and-a-half-months pregnant with her,” Kaling explained. “I went to dinner with my friend B.J. Novak … He parked the car and we got out of the car, I noticed there was a weird kind of guy, staring at us from the parking meter.”
Kaling initially said she was concerned, but after getting out of the car, the man appeared to be a fan of the NBC show. “When we got out, he was like, ‘Hey, love you guys in The Office!'” The Mindy Project star remembered.
Randy Holmes/ABC Minday Kaling
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“Then we walked down to go to the restaurant,” she continued. “Restaurant’s closed, for whatever reason. And then we walked back to the car, and when we walk back to the car — what we think is the car — we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s probably not it, because there’s somebody sitting in the driver’s seat,’ and we keep walking.”
After realizing they’d walked too far, Kaling and Novak, 43, walked back to his car, which she noted was a “fancy” one that automatically locks.
“We go back to the car and the guy that we had talked to by the meter had gotten into B.J.’s car, was sitting in the driver’s seat and had B.J.’s laptop open and was on B.J.’s laptop,” she recalled incredulously. “Which is so strange — he didn’t try to steal his stuff.”
The pair then decided to confront the man. Despite being pregnant at the time, Kaling said she went to the driver’s side door and blocked it so the man couldn’t escape.
Gilbert Flores/Variety/Getty Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak
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“My sense of my sense of justice was greater than my sense of wanting to live,” she joked to Kimmel, 55.
“And then B.J. went to their side, and was like, ‘What did you take?'” she continued. “The guy kept looking over at the door to try to get out. I was sitting there like, ‘You’re not going anywhere.’ Finally, B.J. got his laptop back and all of his stuff and he nodded to me, like, ‘You can open the door and let him out.'”
Then, Kaling said the “strangest” thing happened. When the man exited the car, he told the duo, “You guys should be careful. Anybody could just get into your car.”
“As though this whole thing had been this like, ruse, he had planned to teach us a valuable lesson,” she said with a laugh. “By the way, it did teach us that! And then he kinda wandered away.”
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Good friends since they costarred on The Office together in 2004, and later dated on-and-off in real life, Kaling and Novak have been vocal about their now-platonic love for each other.
They’ve helped each other on creative projects, attended each other’s red-carpet premieres — and in 2017, Novak officially became a member of Kaling’s family when she named him her daughter’s godfather.
In 2014, Novak — who played Ryan Howard on The Office — described his relationship with Kaling as “complicated” while speaking to PEOPLE exclusively.
“A really complicated person and a really complicated friendship, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world,” he said of Kaling, who played his on-again, off-again love interest Kelly Kapoor on the NBC series.
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In a 2019 interview on CBS Sunday Morning, Kaling added of their bond: “It isn’t the thing that people sometimes think it is. But 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 a closer one.”
