Jameela Jamil is a British woman of Indian and Pakistani descent, who has lived full time in the US for a decade. She’s probably best known for The Good Place, but she was also a regular on various British shows back when she lived in the UK. I rarely cover her because I find her to be a bit Chrissy Teigen-like – too online, too chaotic and very messy at every level. And much like Teigen, Jameela is friendly with the Duchess of Sussex. Well, Jameela is getting a lot of attention this week for calling British people “the most evil people in history.” Oh…
Stripped of their roles at the Queen Elizabeth II Commonwealth Trust after they quit royal duties, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Netflix series Harry & Meghan aired attacks on the Commonwealth, with one contributor dismissing the voluntary organisation as ‘Empire 2.0’. Another commentator claimed in the 2022 documentary that the Commonwealth had ‘not changed a thing [since colonial days], they just got better PR’.
Now Meghan’s friend Jameela Jamil has gone further, admonishing her fellow Britons in an anti-colonial tirade.
‘Americans think British people are so sweet, which is crazy, because British people are truly the most evil people in history,’ declared the California-based actress, adding: ‘Britain is like Thanos [the genocidal Marvel Comics villain]… we colonised the world.’
Speaking on the US podcast Yestergays, The Good Place star revealed how she ‘butted heads’ with the NBC comedy drama’s director, American Michael Schur, because he wanted to make her wealthy British character Tahani Al-Jamil ‘more likeable’.
She said: ‘I was, like, ‘British people, especially rich British people, aren’t likeable to anyone, they’re horrible, they’re awful’… he went with the passive aggressive b****y version.’
Jameela, 40, attended £32,000-a-year Queen’s College school in London’s Marylebone, whose alumnae include Vogue supremo Anna Wintour and actress Jane Asher. She was a guest on the duchess’s Archetypes podcast in 2022 when she sympathetically told the former Suits actress: ‘It’s an unfathomable amount of s*** that you take, Meghan.’
It’s not the first time that Jameela has criticised her former compatriots. Last year, she explained why she had moved to California like Harry and Meghan.
‘I went over there because I was sick of England,’ she said. ‘[I was sick of] being made to feel at 28 that my time was up, being told to reinvent myself. I’ve never heard of a man being told he needs to reinvent himself in his 20s.’
She added: ‘I’d been told for 17 years that my 15 minutes [of fame] is going to be up soon. At what point are we going to stop panicking women? It’s so preposterous. I was offended by the way I was being treated, so I went to America.’
What’s crazy about the “my time was up at 28” thing is that I’ve always considered the UK film/TV industry much friendlier and more supportive to actresses over a certain age. But there’s an important caveat: white actresses. Many British actors of color have said similar things about why they moved to America to pursue their careers here – it’s because the British industry sets up crazy roadblocks and typecasts people of color. As for British people being “the most evil people in history,” I mean… there are other colonizers out there, it’s not just Britain. But people should remember her background too – my Indian father liked British people (he called it “the old Empire connection”) but he would also say this kind of stuff about them too. The scars of Britain’s imperial days are still felt in many countries to this day.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
-
- HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA – JANUARY 06: English actress, writer, presenter, podcaster, and advocate Jameela Jamil arrives at the Los Angeles Premiere Of Netflix’s ‘People We Meet On Vacation’ held at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood on January 6, 2026 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, United States.,Image: 1063942994, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no , Pictured: Jameela Jamil , Credit line: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon
-
- Jameela Jamil at the UK Gala Screening of Elio at Vue West End, London, UK, 15 June 2025.,Image: 1011213792, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no , Credit line: Abdullah Bailey/Avalon
-
- HOLLYWOOD, LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, USA – JANUARY 06: English actress, writer, presenter, podcaster, and advocate Jameela Jamil arrives at the Los Angeles Premiere Of Netflix’s ‘People We Meet On Vacation’ held at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood on January 6, 2026 in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, United States.,Image: 1063943006, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no , Pictured: Jameela Jamil , Credit line: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon
She is absolutely correct. Nothing In history matches the slaughter and theft of the British empire.
Totally. I saw a video about this recently, and the numbers are truly astonishing.
Britain drained an estimated $45 trillion from India between 1765 and 1938. This calculated total is roughly 15 times the annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.
I grew up in an ex-Brit colony . They are wildly arrogant & white supremacist & do a great hatchet job sanitizing their horrific colonial history. I went to a English-speaking school, which bald faced lied about what they did in history books! My father had to tell me the truth about various atrocities they carried out in India & China.
I hate when people say this, because it’s not supposed to be a competition. All empires are bad in their own horrific way…..besides, King Leopold’s right there.
I wouldn’t let the Ottomans off the hook so easily, but her comments reminded me of a time when after hiking Dartmoor we were soggy and cold. We wanted to eat somewhere dry and warm. But in a very remote area the local inn wouldn’t even let us in with our American accents and unkempt appearance. We had to sneak around back to use the loo.
If not the most evil then who? They made colonization their bread and butter and took it to the next level.
The US with genocide of native Americans and slavery perhaps? Nazi Germany? The USSR under Stalin? Cambodia under Pol Pot? China under Mao? And more. Plenty of contenders.
The Belgian Congo? It’s just ridiculous to say the British are the worst. They did a lot of bad things and a lot of good things, unlike the Ottomans, say.
Humans of all types are cruel and evil.
Is she really like Chrissy Teigen? I have never heard a bad word about her. Or about any messiness…? She seems to have really smart takes on misogyny and discrimination.
Some people love her others don’t. She’s often described as polarizing. Here’s a breakdown and you can decide for yourself.
https://www.thethings.com/jameela-jamil-activism-good-place/
She has a history of telling repeated substantial lies about her past, she’s claimed to dozens of deathly illnesses, to have died or nearly died numerous times, constantly invents different dramatic backstories for herself, has claimed multiple outlandish former careers (all of which appear to be made up).
She’s claimed to have been personally responsible for getting major laws changed with no evidence that’s true, and to be a leading Palestinian peace activist who has done more to arrange peace in Palestine than anyone else (when she’d barely mentioned Palestine).
Two months ago she made a dramatic social media announcement that she’d just been kidnapped by an international gang of sex traffickers then just never mentioned it again.
She got a lot of attention for slamming influencers for selling diet tea and other snake oil products then sold her own wellness supplements online.
She came out as trans then did a 180 and had a huge TERF phase.
She can’t go ten minutes without being kidnapped or nearly killed in a car crash or something else extremely dramatic. She’s also been accused of stealing things that happened to other people, like a co-worker was stung by a bee when he was with her, and she publicly told the story as she was attacked by a giant swarm of bees.
I’ve never heard of her being rude or nasty, but she seems quite mentally ill, someone did a big deep dive making the argument that she has Munchausens, because she makes outlandish health claims constantly.
She’s 100% correct.
No notes.
The British version of colonialism seems to have given PTSD to the native populations they colonized and also their descendants. This article just reminded me of something I’m old enough to remember–the BAFTA awards. From this year!
She’s not wrong. If Richard Eden and others are offended so be it. There’s a black British comedian named London Hughes who moved to the US in 2020 and she says that she will never go back to the UK to live because of how the entertainment industry treats black people.
Yes.
That is all.
In like ALL of history? Because I doubt that. Didn’t some ancient civilizations deal with their enemies by killing all the men, throwing the baby boys off the walls and enslaving all the girls and women? That seems pretty evil.
I get her point but she’s being so hyperbolic it makes it hard to take her seriously.
Yeah, my thoughts first went to Leopold of Belgium but I don’t think she is far off. There have been maybe worse at certain times in history but I think Britain wins for the longest sustained crusade against humanity.
Yeah, I’m taking her statement to mean the most evil empire whose descendants are STILL in power!!!! India was plummeted during Victoria’s reign, and Charles is her great-whatever grandson!
England’s history is absolutely vile. They’ve really had some state-sponsored bloodthirsty perverted violent nonsense going on for centuries and have come out looking like the “polite” ones.
Guess who Leopold of Belgium called for help when he didn’t have the army to colonize the Congo? His cousin the very British Queen Victoria who sent a Canadian officer (William Grant Stairs, whose statue still stands in Halifax) to carry out the horrors documented in King Leopold’s Ghost. Side note: It was two Black Americans who exposed their atrocities to the world – George Washington Williams and William Sheppard.
Stairs was recommended by explorer Henry Stanley. It was actually in opposition to the British who were battling with the Congo to take over Katanga, also known as Garanganze, which was not yet claimed by a European power. The area was larger than many European countries. The British had chartered a company to make treaties with African chiefs, the BSAC of Cecil Rhodes, “who mixed a determined approach to gaining mineral concessions with a vision for British imperial development spanning the continent.” Msiri, the chief of Katanga, had started as a slave trader, and “had used superior weapons obtained by trading ivory, copper and slaves, to conquer and subjugate neighboring tribes, taking many of them as slaves for resale.” By this time he was the unchallenged despot of the area.
Leopold had used Stanley’s services before and understood Stairs to be in the same mold, with a reputation for carrying out orders completely and without hesitation. The Belgians emerged victorious and Leopold used his influence and to gain acceptance of the treaties signed to place Katanga securely in Leopold’s realm but separate from the rest of the Free State. Katanga remained affected by instability as various players struggled to fill the vacuum left by Msiri’s death in the conflict.
Katanga and the Congo were taken over by the Belgian government in 1908 in response to the international outcry over the brutality of Leopold’s Congo Free State. They were merged in 1910 as the Belgian Congo, but the “legacy of the previous separation was a tendency of Katanga to secede.”
Katanga gained Independence in 1960 but with only a recent history of direct rule they were unprepared and within a few years Congo and Katanga became bywords for strife and chaos. The Mobutu regime, trying to improve its image, changed the names to Zaire and Shaba respectively (since reverted).
The British did this too. The slave trade atrocities carried out by them would make your stomach turn. Warning warning…. One of the most famous documented is the The Zorg, the slave ship where they made a bunch of navigation errors and wanted to essentially commit insurance fraud so threw over a hundred bound slaves mostly women and children overboard.
The harbors slave ships docked in in Africa were swarming with sharks for obvious reasons. This is brutal…. if any slaves tried to fight back on the ship, they’d be made an example of by being literally chopped to pieces in front of the other slaves.
The British empire was probably the most brutal in human history. Considering it’s competition, that’s saying something. I’d recommend the book “The Zorg”.
@christine, and weren’t the British the first to use concentration camps, as we know them, in Africa? I can’t remember exactly when it was, or where it was, but I think it was at the beginning of the last century and horrible atrocities were happening to these malnourished people, literally starving and left to die, if not of starvation, disease, and the only reason it improved or was abated somewhat was because photographs were taken of some of the starving internees that caused an uproar in Britain.
Yeah when people make comments like these it screams “I know nothing about world history”.
Of course the British Empire was abhorrent. But calling it the most evil ever is ridiculous especially since the concepts of empire, colonisation and enslavement were invented and heavily practiced thousands of years before Indo-European tribes migrated into the European continent. Historical records alone will tell you of the horrific genocides and enslavement practiced from Assyria, Hittites, Egypt, Athens, Rome, Mongols, Ottoman Empire, all the way to the British, and lets not forget Hitler and his Japanese comrades and their exploits in WW2, continued through to Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and finally good old American imperialism throughout the 20th century and beyond, from South America across the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And lets not forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Broaden your horizons Jameela, people of all backgrounds and colors can be horrific to each other on massive scales.
Of course, but I really believe that Britain, including even before William the Conqueror, has had a very long millennium plus time frame during which their atrocities were committed. I am hard-pressed to think of another “dynasty” for lack of a better word that has committed more, over a sustained period of time, much in the name of God and country (supposedly 🙄). The Crusades, anyone?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific, and had a wave of consequences, but if you read or watch anything about the war in the pacific, especially leading up to the summer of 1945, you can see why the decision was made. Japanese civilians in the various islands were being used to lure allied sailors and marines and also commiting mass suicide, troops in Iwo Jima fought until literally the last man even when defeat was assured, surrender was considered a grave sin and humiliation, devotion to the emperor was complete and kamikaze attacks were becoming commonplace. They warned people to leave before the bombs were dropped. And fewer people were killed than in the fire bombings of Tokyo. It was hoped this would en$ the war with less bloodshed and it did. And the blast washed away much of Japanese history of atrocities throughout Asia and the pacific in the previous decade. They weren’t any better than the Nazi regime.
@bqm, “They warned people to leave before the (atomic) bombs were dropped.”. What?! Where are you getting this information because I have never heard that confirmed from anyone who actually participated in that operation.
One of my grandfathers was on one of the first US ships into Nagasaki after the bombs had been dropped. His ship, on the way to the Marianas, right before the bombs were flown from Tinian, was hit by friendly fire because they were all under radio silence and the other ship didn’t see their return signal. Why were they under radio silence if Japan had been warned?
I had the great and good fortune to be able to speak with numerous veterans of world war II and not one of them, not my relatives, my grandfather in the European and Pacific naval theaters, my great uncle who fought on iwo-jima, other US veterans, including Navajo Code Talkers (who were revered in the Mariana Islands before most Americans even knew about them), Japanese veterans and survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, ever indicated that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki knew of and had been warned of the impending atomic bombs.
My grandfather, who was actually there in Nagasaki, thought that it was nothing short of an atrocity that was committed by the US against Japanese civilians.
And I don’t think that wholesale atrocities against civilians in the name of “expediency,” are ever okay.
I will also add that my grandfather believed not only that it was an atrocity but that it was an ILLEGAL atrocity committed by the US military against Japanese civilians under the then Hague convention. I grew up with a very healthy disrespect for the US armed services because I would hear these horrible stories from my grandfather about illegalities and otherwise atrocious acts committed by the US (and British) Navy that were then covered up. Some of which are only beginning to come to light in this century. He was a very proud naval veteran but thought that many of his superiors were, if not outright imbeciles, certainly unethical and immoral..
I agree with her in part. Because Kind Leopold and Belgium would like a word.
🎯
But, also, a wonderfully supple language.
As a Brit I take no issue with her words; a little hyperbolic sure, but her general point is correct. We colonised and plundered and the ripples of this history are still playing out in every day traumas and poverties.
I also agree, as a British peasant, that our wealthy are the worst. Just look at our Government and the HORROR anytime anyway not blue blooded dares get involved.
Always in awe (in a negative way) of how among all the brutal colonizers, the British empire sanitized its image. Remarkable PR game.
My Irish grandfather never forgave the British for their treatment of the Irish
And my English husband would agree with her about the awfulness of British rich people. He cannot stomach shows like “Downton Abbey” and “The Crown” because they remind him of how the upper classes in England treat people like him, who have the wrong kind of British accents and come from working-class families.
He loves America because Americans think all British accents are posh LOL.
I really like Jameela. She has been outspoken on issues such as body image (she had anorexia as a teen) and mental health and transgender rights. She is, as my English husband would say, a good sort.
I really like her too and I find her hilarious in different roles. Being funny isn’t easy. I agree about the British. I have quoted Roy Wood Jr. before on it being colonizer corporate headquarters. It’s not just scars for people like your husband (and me, frankly), it’s an ongoing foundation underneath every institution from church to state. Optimistically, some changes towards decolonization are happening and at the moment our children are still experiencing harm. Which is obvious I know and I love all the people calling it out and driving change.
That’s an interesting observation about how television shows like Downton Abbey and The Crown whitewash the British aristocracy and its classism.
They completely do. Julian Fellowes is the worst.
If America had the opportunity at the time they would most certainly rival the UK for the most colonial acting country of all…the timing was wrong. But since they couldn’t take the prize yes UK certainly was the king of whiteness and making whiteness in charge of the world for a lot of centuries. It seems like white female actors can work into their nineties in the UK and be named Dames etc…but we don’t really see that with brown women…
By sheer spread and damage, not even close. The US doesn’t even come second to Britain considering the rest of Europe also exists. Most of Central and South America speaks Spanish because of colonialism. Africa has been colonized to hell by Europe and the Arabic empire which also colonized the whole Middle East. A lot of issues in the Middle East exist because of the country borders drawn by the British. That’s not even bring Asia into play. The US isn’t absolved, it’s competition is just too stiff.
I agree with her, only they are tied with King Leopold and Belgium for slavery, torture, rape, pillage and the genocide in the Congo, formerly Zaire.
One of the most evil things to ever happen in history, and yet, we never hear about this atrocity.
Are her words hyperbolic? Sure. Is she wrong? Not really. And I am well versed n world history. But Britain is in the top five – EASILY. And anyone who would dispute that doesn’t know history – specifically English/British history.
So the Spanish and Portuguese (OG colonisers) don’t even get a look in? I don’t go here, but uh…Bartolome las Casas would like a word.
I adore her and especially her podcast. She’s also quite correct.
She’s right.