The fourth season of Phoebe Robinson’s Sooo Many White Guys podcast launched today with an interview with The Good Place’s Jameela Jamil, and while it featured Jamil saying a lot of thought-provoking things about death and her (very appreciated) habit of calling out celebrity bullshit, it also featured her dropping an anecdote about breaking a toilet during her audition for The Good Place. No matter what else you have to say, that’s always going to be the sort of story that overwhelms anything else that someone may take away from an interview.
Jamil’s toilet story is predictably harrowing, as most stories about broken toilets are, but this one has the added thrill of happening on what is essentially a job interview—and a particularly high-stakes job interview, since Jamil had never really acted before. On the podcast, she told Robinson that there was only one toilet at the office, and after she used it, the handle to flush it broke off in her hand. She says her first instinct was to “climb out the window and leave and go back to England,” which is definitely what any one of us would’ve done, but her second idea was to reach in and take care of the problem herself. “I’m just about to make contact with the water,” she said, “and then in the corner of my eye I see there’s this little bit of metal sticking out the side of toilet,” which she figured she could use to activate the flushing mechanism. She got the part, of course, so no matter what happened it’s probably the happiest ending to any “the toilet broke” story in the history of mankind.
Elsewhere in the podcast, Jamil mentioned celebrities privately commending her for calling out bullshit “wellness” products and then continuing to promote them in public as well as her history with anorexia and the problem with the fact that the UK press fat-shamed her when she was first starting out but now she’s slim and famous and everybody has started paying attention to her, saying “that in itself defines the problem.” In other words, it’s interesting beyond the toilet story, but the toilet story is, well, a toilet story. You can hear Jamil’s episode of Sooo Many White Guys at this link, with upcoming episodes featuring Padma Lakshmi, Roy Wood Jr., and Vanessa Bayer.