Mindy Kaling has always kept her lips sealed about the identity of her children’s father, yet fans can’t seem to stop speculating that her longtime friend, BJ Novak, shares a deeper connection to her family than previously thought.
The Office stars added fuel to the fire on Tuesday during Mindy’s Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, where BJ made a rousing speech about his close friend.
“Mindy respects and understands [fame] in a very intuitive way…in addition to being a brilliant and wildly successful showrunner, an incredible mother of three, a deep and caring daughter and friend and mentor to so many,” he told the crowd, as per People.
“You’d be on the walk of talent if they had one,” he added. “You’d be on the walk of friendship. You’d be on the walk of compassionate parenthood, but let’s face it all of these would be terrible field trips, so here you are instead, very deservedly, a person who means so much to so many on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.”
Mindy was visibly emotional during the speech and thanked the 45-year-old for his warm words.
“Fun Fact: My daughter calls BJ uncle FoFo, I have no idea why that is,” she quipped.
“But he’s such an important and integral part of my family that sometimes I forget that the reason that I know him is that we worked together professionally. And I’m as starstruck by him now, at age 29, as I was when I first met you, at age 24. I love you.”
BJ is the godfather of Mindy’s three children; she secretly welcomed her daughter Katherine “Kit” Swati in 2017, followed by her son, Spencer Avu, in 2021, and another daughter, Anne, in February 2024.
The Mindy Project star has always maintained that she would not reveal the identity of the father of her children until she’d had a chance to speak with them about the topic first.
© Variety via Getty Images“My feeling is that, until I speak to my daughter about that, I’m not going to talk to anyone else about it,” she told the New York Times.
That has not stopped rampant speculation that BJ shared a closer relationship with her children than his godfather status belies.
The pair first met in the writer’s room of The Office in the 2000s and shared an on-and-off-again relationship until they decided they were better off as friends.
© FilmMagicSince Mindy called off her romance with author Benjamin Nugent, whom she dated from 2008 until 2012, neither her nor BJ has been pictured publicly with another partner, fanning the flames of a rumored romance.
The actor shared that his deep connection with Mindy has caused some confusion with new partners in the past.
“We are pretty inseparable best friends with a lot of chemistry ourselves, and we’re not dating,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
© Instagram“Whenever we date anyone else, I think there’s a period where the person is very skeptical of our friendship.”
However, Mindy explained that their friendship ran much deeper than any romance they ever shared together.
“He’s the godfather to my daughter. I see him every week,” she told CBS News. “It isn’t the thing that people sometimes think it is. 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. We do spend a lot of time together and it’s a great blessing in my life.”
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