Ella Hunt on Not Suitable for Work, Making Music

Imagine the hectic and near nonstop promotion schedule of a new television series. It’s enough to tire out any actor. Now, add in the release of a deeply personal debut album, and you’ll begin begin to understand what life has looked like for English actress and singer Ella Hunt.

The 28-year-old British actress returned to TV last month in Mindy Kaling’s 20-something Hulu series Not Suitable For Work. She plays AJ Pascarelli in the Friends-esque comedy about young people living in Manhattan’s Murray Hill neighborhood, which premiered on June 2. Three days later, Hunt released Blindspot, her debut album. It’s been a bit of a month, to say the least.

“I’m used to having a moment to breathe when I put something out,” Hunt tells The Hollywood Reporter on a Zoom that busy week in June. “This week has had a whole wave of newness to it that I’ve not experienced before. Where normally I would take a step back to go water my garden and sit with my cats and take in people responding to the work I’ve done. I’m not in that place yet.”

Hunt has been finding pockets of time to breathe and take in the excitement of this moment. She’s proud of herself for “spinning both of the central plates” in her life at the same time. But she didn’t necessarily plan this to all happen at once.

The multi-hyphenate locked her album release date as June 5 several months in advance, a necessity when dealing with vinyl releases. Not Suitable For Work, or NSFW, was originally slated to premiere in May. Those around Hunt assured her she’d be in the clear and have a clear head going into the album’s rollout, but as anyone knows, it doesn’t always work out according to plan.

“When I found out that the show was pushing its dates, I just have had to embrace that this rollout doesn’t look the way that maybe it would look if I wasn’t promoting the show. But I’m really grateful to both things and I love both things, obviously in very different capacities,” she says. Hunt pauses the conversation briefly — her objectively adorable cat, who lounges around her lap throughout the conversation, is trying to eat her avocado toast.

Hunt’s just trying to roll with the situation because it’s all good things. She’s been pondering the difference in the internet’s reception to new music and a new television show. “I’m really noticing that the emphasis is on a very different kind of thing, including things that feel homemade and personal and immediate,” she says. “With both the show and the album, I’m super aware that actually nothing could be more impactful than just being honest about where I’m at today.”

On the acting front, things are pretty straightforward. “Being part of the Mindy-verse was exciting to me,” the actress says. NSFW’s writers gave Hunt “very specific character sides” for AJ, a first-year analyst at an investment bank, and Hunt found them to be “memorable and intense.”

Throughout her career, Hunt has found herself in the role of the quiet and stoic types — her longest-running TV role remains Sue Gilbert in Apple TV’s Dickinson. It wasn’t until Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, where she plays legendary comedian Gilda Radner, that she was given the opportunity to tackle funny women roles.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say that [stoic roles] are a real comfort zone for me,” she admits. “But having played Gilda, I felt like I had more confidence in a comedy space.”

Playing the Saturday Night Live icon was seemingly a game-changer for the actress. “Gilda taught me a lot technically. I learned a lot about just how much energy it takes to be funny and that being on is a whole body aliveness,” Hunt says. “When I did my tape for Not Suitable for Work, it was very energetic. I just was throwing paint at the wall with my Gilda hat on.”

When Hunt met Kaling for the show, she was also shooting a film. She’d been on nights shoots until 7 a.m., grabbed a mere two hours of sleep and jumped on a Zoom call with Kaling and others, among them Greg Mottola, who was directing the pilot. “I was on a call with a bunch of people I really admired, and I think because I was so sleep-deprived, I felt like I had an ease about the situation,” she says.

There was a lot to love about NSFW for Hunt. It shot in New York. It was about a group of young people. And her character didn’t feel like someone she had to “go to war with.” Hunt is firm about the fact she and the character are different, but she’s found herself feeling at home in AJ’s shoes.

Blindspot is Hunt’s biggest swing at music so far, but it has long been at the center of her life. She starred as a music-loving teen in the 2019 film Kat and the Band and led a delightfully strange Scottish horror musical comedy, Anna and the Apocalypse, a couple years before that. “Oh, god,” she says with a laugh when the latter is brought up.

But Blindspot is unlike the anything she’s done before. It’s captivating, it’s raw and it’s quite personal to Hunt. “This record is predominantly about grief,” she explains.

In June 2023, Hunt’s half-sister, Emily, passed away. Blindspot was born out of what she calls her “grief fog” after that loss. The singer’s grateful for the time capsule that album has become.

Grief is, unfortunately, a fairly universal subject. “I don’t know what your experience of grief was because I don’t think any two experiences of it are the same, but I do think that there is this funny kind of crystallization that happens around that time,” she says. “There were definitely gestures and moments that felt so much more memorable than they would have otherwise. Mundanities like washing up a coffee mug or taking the laundry out. I’d say overall that those spaces can feel just completely impenetrable from the outside and even in memory so distorted.”

The truth is that Hunt was never sure she was going to write this album. “I had about six months of feeling like I definitely shouldn’t write about this before I started writing about it and then it was like vomit,” she says. “I felt a real resistance to the idea of writing anything poetic about something that felt so unquenchably dark. But eventually I was able to see that it was a whole spectrum of feeling. It took a while once there was writing to come around to imagining sharing it with anyone. I definitely wasn’t [planning] to write an album about my grief experience and put it out for the world.”

As she continued working on the music, she found herself crafting a mission statement of sorts, something to share with people when she put the music out into the world. Perhaps the most memorable thought she put to paper she labels as cheesy, but it’s real and it’s relatable: “I wrote this for me.”