Ella Hunt Is the Busiest Woman In Show Business

Ella Hunt feels like she’s in an endless sea of Thursdays. We meet for tea at The Marlton Hotel the Monday of what will probably be the busiest week of her career: The next day, her new show, the Mindy Kaling-created comedy Not Suitable for Work, will premiere on Hulu and Disney+, and on Friday, she’ll release Blindspot, her debut album. “I’m the dummy that decided to put out an album the week a TV show is coming out,” the British entertainer, 28, tells NYLON. “I feel like I’m in midweek madness, and I’m just trying to keep my head.”

The third installment in a trilogy of shows exploring Kaling’s relationship to young adulthood, Not Suitable for Work follows young professionals AJ Pascarelli (played by Hunt), Abby Chilukuri (Avantika Vandanapu), Josh Teitelbaum (Jack Martin), Kel Washington (Nicholas Duvernay), and Davis Beau Bradley Barrett III (Will Angus) as they navigate life in New York City. The show is teeming with Kaling’s signature comedic cultural commentary (the most famous person in the show’s universe is Cate Blanchett’s nephew, naturally), and yes, there’s even a “Nora Efron-esque” rom-com subplot à la The Mindy Project. “[Mindy Kaling] is really f*cking phenomenal,” says Hunt. “I loved working with Mindy and was really impressed at her ability to make me and the other cast members feel at ease and at home and like an equal. She’s very self-deprecating and warm, and very hardworking, and [she] kind of instilled that in all of us.”

Somehow in the midst of the crazy New York shooting schedule, Hunt also managed to find the time to work on Blindspot. It was initially written in December 2023 around the loss of her sister, Emily, to brain cancer and recorded six months later, but Hunt’s busy acting schedule barred her from entering the production phase for a long stretch of time. In fall 2025, she booked a residency at Café Carlyle while filming NSFW and realized the album wasn’t as complete as she thought it was. “Playing with the band made me realize that there was a spirit that I wanted to get on the record that wasn’t there yet,” says Hunt. “So I went back into the studio while we were shooting on the weekends, and recorded with the band.”

From there, she was able to capture the spirit of “how I sounded as a kid playing the piano in the kitchen” with minimal vocal processing, layering, overdubs, comped takes, and mixing. “We barely touched it,” the Dickinson actor says. “I wanted it to sound like how you would experience me sat in the room together.” In the end, she walked away with an album that’s just as raw as the circumstance under which it was written. But with radical honesty comes a level of discomfort as well. “I’m a little nervous about [putting out] ‘Dove Grey,’” she admits. “It’s the one on the record that’s most personal, and it has so many details of my family that I really toyed with whether or not to put it out.”

“I love playing it live,” she continues. “It feels like a really important moment of the live set, and to be able to talk gently about palliative care and the light that it cast my family in, it is a very lovely thing to get to do. It’s really sensitive, but writing that song felt like a gateway into everything else and gave me permission to be a little bit more poetic and expansive in my exploration of grief.”

Even now, four days before the album’s release, she still has her reservations. “I’m fearful about the next chapter of this body of work’s existence,” Hunt says. “‘Fearful’ may be the wrong word, but I have a lot of anticipation about how to do this next step in the process, and I’m only going to learn about it through doing it.”

Needless to say, she’s already learned one valuable lesson: To space out the release of her next acting and music projects. “For me, acting sort of feels like an inhale. It’s a lot of taking in information and listening,” says Hunt. “Music feels like an exhalation; a kind of release and relief and a freedom. So it actually feels really good to me to do them at the same time… but putting them out at the same time is chaotic as f*ck.”

Photographs by Jillian Giandurco