You could be forgiven for thinking, at first glance, that Jameela Jamil is the real-life version of her performatively generous, ostentatiously humanitarian The Good Place character, Tahani al-Jamil. The 31-year-old English actress soldiered through a friendless childhood punctuated by weight struggles, racist bullying, and a car accident that left her unable to walk for a year on her way to becoming a network television star. Jamil has even explained that she first developed an interest in acting when she was teaching English to foreign students in London. She liked all the pantomime, she found. But if Jameela Jamil ever actually met Tahani al-Jamil? “I would punch her in the tit,” she declares, unprompted. “One hundred percent.” (One tit, she clarifies a moment later.)

Jamil, whose Good Place gig marks her first real acting job after several years as a television host in the U.K. (“There are newborn babies who have only a tiny bit less experience than I do in acting”), is as irreverent and funny as she is eloquent. She spoke to GQ in November about Tahani’s surprising evolution on the show, her favorite thing about erotic Good Place fan fiction, and the time Ted Danson spent a whole day pretending to fart on her.

GQ: Before The Good Place, you were famous for an entirely different thing in an entirely different country. How is getting recognized on the street here in the U.S. different from getting recognized on the street in the U.K.?

Jameela Jamil: Well, I was on television seven days of the week in the U.K., so I think I used to get recognized a lot more. Also, the U.K. is a lot smaller. Here it happens less, mostly because no one gives a shit in L.A.—Jack Nicholson is behind you at the deli, or Elton John is at the buffet, or J.Lo is, like, squatting by the yogurt. And I like that. I'm a constantly inappropriate person, so it's not great to me to feel like I have to behave myself. If anything that makes me worse. Ted [Danson] literally warns journalists about me, by the way. He says I'm a loose cannon and calls me a potty mouth. Potty Mouth Jamil. It's fine. I call him Loose Lips Danson. That man cannot keep a secret for love nor money. I don't understand how we even kept the twist a secret. He was literally telling everyone.

What parts of Tahani were already built into the character when you first read the role, and what parts did you add yourself?

She was much sweeter when I first read her, and I just don't think that's true of Londoners. We're not sweet people. We're passive-aggressive people; we're quite repressed and we're secretly competitive, but we never want to show it on the outside 'cause “ambition” is a dirty word. I do think Mike [Schur, the show's creator] said he wanted someone English, preferably of a Middle Eastern background or Pakistani. There wasn't really a script available to anyone. We didn't know what the character was. We didn't know what the show was gonna be about. I didn't know if it was gonna be, like, Mike Schur's first porno. I had to sign a seven-year deal literally not knowing anything, just praying that everyone would be wearing clothes.