Jameela Jamil is a British woman of Indian and Pakistani descent, who has lived full time in the US for a decade. She’s probably best known for The Good Place, but she was also a regular on various British shows back when she lived in the UK. I rarely cover her because I find her to be a bit Chrissy Teigen-like – too online, too chaotic and very messy at every level. And much like Teigen, Jameela is friendly with the Duchess of Sussex. Well, Jameela is getting a lot of attention this week for calling British people “the most evil people in history.” Oh…
Stripped of their roles at the Queen Elizabeth II Commonwealth Trust after they quit royal duties, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix series Harry & Meghan aired attacks on the Commonwealth, with one contributor dismissing the voluntary organisation as ‘Empire 2.0’. Another commentator claimed in the 2022 documentary that the Commonwealth had ‘not changed a thing [since colonial days], they just got better PR’.
Now Meghan’s friend Jameela Jamil has gone further, admonishing her fellow Britons in an anti-colonial tirade.
‘Americans think British people are so sweet, which is crazy, because British people are truly the most evil people in history,’ declared the California-based actress, adding: ‘Britain is like Thanos [the genocidal Marvel Comics villain]… we colonised the world.’
Speaking on the US podcast Yestergays, The Good Place star revealed how she ‘butted heads’ with the NBC comedy drama’s director, American Michael Schur, because he wanted to make her wealthy British character Tahani Al-Jamil ‘more likeable’.
She said: ‘I was, like, ‘British people, especially rich British people, aren’t likeable to anyone, they’re horrible, they’re awful’… he went with the passive aggressive b****y version.’
Jameela, 40, attended £32,000-a-year Queen’s College school in London’s Marylebone, whose alumnae include Vogue supremo Anna Wintour and actress Jane Asher. She was a guest on the duchess’s Archetypes podcast in 2022 when she sympathetically told the former Suits actress: ‘It’s an unfathomable amount of s*** that you take, Meghan.’
It’s not the first time that Jameela has criticised her former compatriots. Last year, she explained why she had moved to California like Harry and Meghan.
‘I went over there because I was sick of England,’ she said. ‘[I was sick of] being made to feel at 28 that my time was up, being told to reinvent myself. I’ve never heard of a man being told he needs to reinvent himself in his 20s.’
She added: ‘I’d been told for 17 years that my 15 minutes [of fame] is going to be up soon. At what point are we going to stop panicking women? It’s so preposterous. I was offended by the way I was being treated, so I went to America.’
What’s crazy about the “my time was up at 28” thing is that I’ve always considered the UK film/TV industry much friendlier and more supportive to actresses over a certain age. But there’s an important caveat: white actresses. Many British actors of color have said similar things about why they moved to America to pursue their careers here – it’s because the British industry sets up crazy roadblocks and typecasts people of color. As for British people being “the most evil people in history,” I mean… there are other colonizers out there, it’s not just Britain. But people should remember her background too – my Indian father liked British people (he called it “the old Empire connection”) but he would also say this kind of stuff about them too. The scars of Britain’s imperial days are still felt in many countries to this day.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
