Playboy Interview: Jameela Jamil

A candid conversation with the activist, Good Place star and social-media firebrand on figuring out when to take up space and when to stand aside

Every once in a while, somewhere amid the shouting, social media can offer glimpses behind the Vaseline-smeared lenses of the entertainment industry. The stars and their feeds suggest a vast gulf between our regular lives and those whose accounts we follow, like and mimic. Actress, writer, DJ and activist Jameela Jamil is hyper aware of the dynamics at play and how they directly affect the lives of vulnerable people offline; indeed, she has taken it upon herself to protect those people. No one asked her to do this, and some don’t believe she should. Jamil considers it a duty nonetheless. She views acting and hosting as her work — and work she’s grateful for — but activism is her calling. She also thinks of it as just one of the many ways traumatized people try to tell the truth.

Jamil was born in London in 1986. Her parents were raised Muslim but didn’t run a religious household. They were conservative, however, and their insistence that Jamil play the role of helper in the family, coupled with a condition that rendered her mostly deaf from birth to the age of 12, left the young girl consumed by her own silence. In her 20s she worked in British radio and TV, developed an eating disorder, made a lot of money, spent a lot of money, gave away a lot of money, endured public abuse while coping with the private abuse she’d suffered as a child, had a nervous breakdown amid battles with depression, anxiety and PTSD, and discovered a lump in her breast. The lump, and the cancer kite floating above it, ready to crash-land into the human life below, changed everything. At 28 she booked a one-way ticket to Los Angeles.