LILLY SINGH
Subscribes to Herself
By Jason Pham
THIRTY DAYS
A week before she turned 30, Singh came out to her parents. She had been practicing the conversation in the mirror for weeks, but could never find the physical words. So she wrote a letter. “The last thing I wanted was for my fear to not allow me to say everything I wanted to say,” she says. “Because you can’t kind of do this. You need to do it.” She wrote the letter while at her parents’ house in Toronto. The only printer was her dad’s, so she had to email the letter to his computer, print it from his desktop and wipe the evidence before anyone could see. She gave the letter to her parents with enough courage to say two words—“Read this”—before she went upstairs to hide as she waited for them to finish it.
She built up two scenarios in her head: “It was either going to go horribly to the point where I was like, ‘OK. If I have to leave the house, where could I go?’ Or it would go so extraordinarily that they throw me a party,” she says. “In my mind, there was no middle ground. When the reality was somewhere in between, I had no way to react.” After what felt like a lifetime, she heard a knock on her door. What happened next is somewhat of a blur. “You tend to bury traumatic things with you,” she says. What Singh can remember is disappointment, a feeling she wouldn’t reconcile with until years later. “In reality, my mom did a great job of saying, ‘I love you no matter what. It doesn’t matter,’” she says. “But because it wasn’t instant understanding and accommodation, I took it personally. I distanced myself from my parents because I thought subconsciously that’s what I needed.”
Top: Mugler. Dress: Paco Rabanne. Shoes: Giuseppe Zanotti. Earrings: Rich Rocks. Rings: On Aura Tout Vu, Jennifer Fisher.
Sweater, Top & Pants: Moschino. Shoes: Giuseppe Zanotti.
Necklace: Wasee Jewels. Earrings: Jennifer Fisher
"One thing I can have is knowing who I am and living my truth."
LILLY SINGH
Coat & Shoes: Gucci. Bodysuit: Commando. Earrings: Flo Design
Singh was raised to be a hustler. She grew up in Scarborough, a suburb of Toronto, with her older sister and parents, Indian immigrants who moved to Canada before she was born. Her mom worked at a company that made CDs and cassettes, while her dad found jobs as a factory worker, cab driver and furniture salesman before opening his own gas station. Singh’s childhood taught her how to survive, even after she no longer needed to. “I have that survival instinct in a time and place where I no longer need it,” she says. “Growing up, I was obsessed with what job I would have, how much I would get paid, how big my house would be. Now I’m at a place where I am well off and I don’t need those things, but I’m still obsessed with those things. The way it’s affected me the most is I associated my value with those things. It was: I don’t just have a good job. I am my job.”
Singh has worked hard her whole life. When she was a cashier at a fast food chain in Canada, she would spend a slow hour refilling forks and garnishing burgers, even if everyone else was relaxing. As her career took off, success came at a price. All-nighters were often. Missing birthdays became the norm. And traveling across the country for half a day to attend one meeting was a badge of honor to her work ethic. Her life was fueled on little sleep and a lot of stress, and for a while, she was happy. Then, a couple years ago, something changed. “I realized I place my value and purpose on a lot of external things: my career, what my parents think of me, what people on the internet think of me,” Singh says. “I never put that energy into myself and what makes me happy. I didn’t know that was an option. I didn’t know you could work on yourself that way. We weren’t taught that in school. We didn’t have tests on that.”
To sort out her life, Singh started writing “Be a Triangle,” a title she came up with after reading something on Google once about how triangles are the strongest shape in the world, a foundation she wanted for her own life. “A right side-up triangle doesn’t teter or waver,” she says. “You can pile upon it, and it doesn’t change." Not everyone was on board with the title, however. “My publishers were like, ‘‘Be a Triangle’ is very confusing,’” says Singh, who originally titled her book, ‘Life Sucks and This Is Why.’ “I was like, ‘It has to be this.’ When I grow up, I want to be a triangle. This shape just resembled the strength I wanted to take on.”
Singh learned a lot from writing the book, but perhaps one of the most important lessons was how to say no to what doesn’t make her happy. One example is her late-night talk show, “A Little Late With Lilly Singh.” When the show first came across her desk in 2018, Singh’s instinct was to turn it down. “I didn’t grow up dreaming about being a late-night host,” she says. “My parents never watched late-night television because they could never relate to any of the hosts.” However, after she learned about what the job would mean—she would be the first South Asian woman, the first internet star and the first bisexual woman of color to host her own late-night show—Singh felt pressure to change her mind. “I made history on so many levels. If I said no and it went to someone else who wasn’t a woman of color, history would not have been made,” she says. “I was bullied by the significance of it all. I was peer-pressured by myself.”
"I want a little girl to watch me and be like, ‘That’s a brown girl.’"
Lilly Singh
"The small instances of queerness I had growing up were either straight or gay, and I never fit into those categories."
"The small instances of queerness I had growing up were either straight or gay, and I never fit into those categories."
Singh soon learned that historic moment was hard to hold onto when the show—which aired at 1:30 a.m. four days a week, nine months out of the year—became all she could do and think about. “I was mentally unhappy,” she says. “I was emotionally exhausted. My entire life—morning, night, everyday—was only this show.” By the end of the first season, part of her was ready for the show to end, while another part would’ve died doing it forever if it meant more representation for women who looked like her. “Spiritually, I wanted the show to end in the sense that it was killing me,” she says. “Professionally, as someone who wanted to pave that path, I didn’t want it to end. I was like, ‘I would do this for a million seasons if it meant that people took Indian women seriously.’ If it means we can be on screen, I would have been tortured for a million more years.” That decision was made for her when NBC canceled “A Little Late With Lilly Singh” after two seasons in 2021 due to poor ratings and its difficult time slot. “The universe did for me what I would have never done for myself,” Singh says.
The time off allowed Singh to refocus her efforts back on acting, a passion she’s had since she was a kid while idolizing actors like The Rock and watching big Hollywood blockbusters. Singh made the move to film and television around seven years ago after she had done almost everything she could on YouTube—a community she still considers herself a part of but a space that no longer challenged her. “My whole career came from the digital space,” she says. “I have over 1,000 videos on YouTube. I probably could do that until I die. But it wasn’t challenging to me anymore.”
However, like her YouTube career, Singh’s success in Hollywood wasn’t overnight. “I didn’t have a hit movie right away just like I didn’t have a viral video right away,” she says. In “Ice Age: Collision Course,” she had two words. In “Bad Moms,” she had one sentence. In HBO’s “Fahrenheit 451,” she had four sentences. “The universe has never said to me, ‘Here is an escalator. Go straight to the top,’” Singh says. “It’s always said, ‘We will drag you through the mud and take you where you want to go.’” Fast forward to 2022, and Singh is a cast member on season 2 of Hulu’s “Dollface.” Not only is the part Singh’s first recurring role, but the character—a bar owner named Liv and the love interest of Shay Mitchell’s Stella—is also Singh’s first major queer part since she came out in 2019. Singh, who didn’t realize her sexuality until she was older, didn’t fully understand the significance of the role until she watched “Dollface” with her friends who learned about their sexuality by seeing Mitchell play a queer character in “Pretty Little Liars.” “They started screaming when Shay and I had our intimate scenes,” Singh says. “I realized an Indian girl may watch me, another Indian girl, and scream, ‘Yes! This is me!’ That’s an experience I never got to have growing up.”
before her 30th birthday, Lilly Singh made a promise to herself. It was a late night in October 2018, and she was contemplating her sexuality, a topic she had thought more and more about ever since she moved from Toronto to Los Angeles in 2015 and was introduced to the idea that queerness wasn’t just gay or straight, but a spectrum. “I just said out loud, ‘I think you’re into girls and guys. I think you’re bisexual,’” Singh, now 33, recalls over a Zoom call from her office in L.A. on a sunny Monday in March. “It was the first time I said it aloud. I started crying. It instantly felt right.”
She immediately told her dog, Scarbro (“He was very supportive. He said all the right things”), before making a to-do list with the names of everyone important she had left to come out to. She set a deadline for herself: her 30th birthday. “Thirty is such a big number, especially for women in Indian cultures,” she says. “They make you feel like 30 is the last year of your life. You’re 30, you should be married, you should have kids. I thought, ‘I don’t have any of those things, but the one thing I can have is knowing who I am and living my truth.’”
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But Singh’s Hollywood momentum doesn’t stop there. On April 22, she’ll play Tiffany Fluffit, a TMZ-like news reporter, in “The Bad Guys,” an animated movie about a gang of animals often seen as villains (a wolf, a snake, a shark, etc.) who are stereotyped based on how they look—an experience Singh knows all too well. “My character is the one that perpetuates these stereotypes. It put me in this exercise of realizing my own biases,” she says. “In today’s age, the world is very black and white. People think there’s a clear narrative of a good versus a bad. This movie challenges that because progress is in the middle, and the truth is often in the gray.” While the movie is animated, it was still important to Singh for her character to look like her, which is why she called her team after her first voiceover session to guarantee that her character, a sensational reporter with brown skin and long black hair, was illustrated as South Asian. “It’s important for representation to exist in animation just as much as live action,” she says. “It was me on screen. I want a little girl to watch me and be like, ‘That’s a brown girl.’”
Soon, Singh will also star in her first lead role in Disney Plus’ “The Muppets Mayhem,” an upcoming series in which she plays Nora, an A&R executive managing a band of Muppets known as The Electric Mayhem. Singh got the audition while she was staying in a hotel in Toronto while filming as a judge on season 2 of “Canada’s Got Talent.” She didn’t have much with her, but she made it work. She borrowed a ring light from the hotel staff and had them print out her script. She wore her coolest band tee and styled her hair in a way she can only describe as “rockerish.” She blasted hard rock music and air guitared for half an hour. “I was really becoming that person,” she says. Her efforts paid off. She was asked to do another audition, where she was introduced to the show’s creators, one of whom she had met before on another Muppets project. “He said to me, ‘You might not remember this but you did a video for my son because he’s a really big fan,’” Singh recalls. “In that moment, I thought, ‘Karma, baby!’” After another round of auditions, the part was hers.
Despite how full her life is, both professionally and personally, there’s still a part missing in the eyes of Singh’s family. “As an Indian woman, kids are a currency and a rite of passage,” she says. “I could be president of the United States and my mom would be like, ‘But do you have kids?’” Still unsure of whether she wanted to be a mother, Singh decided to freeze her eggs in 2021. However, after she was diagnosed with ovarian cysts in 2022 and spent a night in the emergency room, she chose to pause her egg-freezing journey. In that time, Singh came to the conclusion that, while she’s open to adoption, she knows for certain she doesn’t want to bear her own children. “I think the worst thing you can do is bring a kid into this world if you’re not certain you want that kid, and I’m not,” she says. She realizes what she said. “All Indian aunties are going to close their computers right now reading this,” Singh jokes. “But that’s OK. I’ve come to terms with that. I have other ways to contribute to the world.”
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MY FIRST CELEBRITY CRUSH:
Jay Sean "Down." If I'm in a bad mood or I need a pick-me-up, it's my instant energy drink song.
I've heard I'm dating people, and I’m like, "What? They're like brothers to me." I've heard my parent characters are real people. Sometimes I'll take a picture in a car or a plane, and I'll get comments like, "That's not a real car. That's a fake car." Why would anybody have a fake car?!
THE WEIRDEST THING I'VE HEARD ABOUT MYSELF:
THE SONG THAT WILL ALWAYS MAKE ME DANCE:
"Don't let your past dictate who you are. Let it be a part of who you will become." -"My Big Fat Greek Wedding"
It's mostly Americans, to be honest. Ketchup chips are amazing. This is an undisputed fact. But every once in a while, I'll have an American try one and be like, "This is weird." I tell them we can't hang.
THE MOVIE OR TV SHOW QUOTE I SAY ALL THE TIME:
THE FOOD I LOVE THAT EVERYONE ELSE THINKS IS GROSS:
MY ZODIAC SIGN:
The eyeballs. I'm always testing the boundaries of what I can say and then I put that emoji.
MY MOST USED EMOJI:
Singh’s coming out story is one of the many stories she tells in her new book, “Be a Triangle: How I Went From Being Lost to Getting My Life Into Shape,” which debuted on April 5 to the top of Amazon’s bestsellers list. Singh started writing the book two years ago as she entered her 30s and suffered a quarter-life crisis over what she had left to accomplish. “Being in this industry, age, especially for women, is always at the forefront of the conversation,” she says. “I started to get into this mindset of, ‘Oh my God. Am I ever going to penetrate this industry the way I want to? Is that window closed for me?’ My friends would be like, ‘What is it that you want to do?! You’ve done so many things!’”
Her friends are right. Since her YouTube career started in 2010, Singh has amassed more than 17 million subscribers and 4 billion views across her two channels: IISuperwomanII and LillySinghVlogs. She has 23 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook, and has been named on lists like “Forbes’” 30 Under 30 and “Variety’s” 10 Comics to Watch. In 2019, she made history as the first openly bisexual woman of color to host a late-night talk show, “A Little Late with Lilly Singh.” That same year, Jimmy Fallon wrote a profile of her for Time 100’s list of the most influential stars on the rise. She’s won a People’s Choice Award, two Teen Choice Awards and been nominated for an Emmy. In 2018, she launched her own production company, Unicorn Island, and even wrote a New York Times bestselling book, “How to Be a Bawse: A Guide to Conquering Life,” about how she hustled for the career of her dreams. But still, Singh felt unfulfilled, a feeling that made her reevaluate her accomplishments. “I realized, ‘Oh, You actually don’t know what you want.’” she says. “You keep making vision boards of all these accolades, but you don’t know what that feeling is you’re chasing. You think these things will make you happy, but then you accomplish them and you’re just like, ‘OK. Onto the next one.’”
IF I COULD CREATE MY OWN APP, THIS IS WHAT I WOULD DO:
I'm a Libra. It's supposed to mean I'm balanced, and for that reason I do not relate to it.
I'm bad at drinking water. I know there are water trackers, but I would want my phone to physically get up and slap me to drink water, so I could at least drink one glass of water a day. I would want it to shut down my phone if I didn't. If I could provide a urine sample into my phone so it would know and be like, "You can't go on Instagram. You can't check your email because you didn't drink water," that's what I need. .
It’s a rainy Thursday in February and Singh is handling a crisis. She’s on set for a cover shoot, her last stop on a week-long press tour in New York City to promote a slew of new projects. After two and a half weeks on the road, she’s ready to be home. But first, she has business to attend to. “Sorry. I got a text saying my dog is struggling to poop. So I’m dealing with that,” she says as she taps away at her phone while a playlist of Indian pop music blasts around her. Powered on vibes and fruit-punch-flavored Rockstar (her signature drink of choice), Singh, understandably, is the main character of any room she walks into. “What up, people!” she shouted as she arrived on set that morning in a red tie-dye sweatsuit and chunky sneakers from her own closet. She’s loud, unpredictable and electric with energy, a slight contrast from the tone of her Zoom call a month later as she reflects on writing “Be a Triangle” and her struggles with happiness, identity and self-worth.
“The toughest part of me talking about how I get insecure is every person I talk to is like, ‘What?! But you’re loud and you use your hands and you wear hats and you’re so confident!’” she confesses while sitting at an L-shaped desk in her office in L.A. in a white sports cap and a brown tie-dye T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “But I am. I’m super insecure and that comes from my need to be perfect and control.” Singh is trying to unlearn those habits, however. The Zoom is her first item in a stacked schedule of back-to-back meetings. After it ends, she’ll have 10 minutes to eat for the first time that day before she has to hop on her next call. The hustle is still real, but not more real than her mental health.
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“No matter where your life goes, no matter if you fulfill everything on your vision board, can you still come home to a place where you know who you are?” she asks herself. “It’s not just solving the problem right now. It’s, ‘Hey, Lilly, in 10 years, when a whole new set of obstacles come your way, you still need that strong foundation.’ If you create a strong base, you’re ready for anything.”
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and I'll get comments like, "That's not a real car. That's a fake car." Why would anybody have a fake car?!
