Nicholas Duvernay On ‘Not Suitable For Work’ & Playing “The Hot Guy”

Nicholas Duvernay Doesn’t Want You To Give Up On LoveThe rising star plays the designated “hot guy” in Not Suitable For Work — but his character has feelings, too: “Hopefully, the guys watch this and go, ‘Wow, maybe I can open up to my homeboys.’”

by Gabrielle BondiJune 11, 2026Nicholas Duvernay was enjoying summer in Montreal last year, filming the upcoming rom-com The Love Hypothesis opposite Lili Reinhart, when he got a call that he’d landed one of the leading roles in Mindy Kaling’s new TV comedy, Not Suitable for Work. As kismet would have it, his new co-star, Jack Martin, happened to be visiting Reinhart, his girlfriend, on set.

“I was like, ‘Bro, it’s official — I’m gonna be Kel!’” Duvernay tells me over Zoom from his apartment in Los Angeles. “It was all perfect timing — him coming to set was like a good omen.”

Along with Martin, Duvernay, 26, stars with Ella Hunt, Avantika, and Will Angus in Hulu’s ensemble comedy about fresh-out-of-college 20-somethings who live across the hall from each other in New York City’s Murray Hill neighborhood. It may sound like a Gen-Z version of Friends, but the show is decidedly more career-focused than the classic NBC sitcom. In particular, Duvernay’s character, Kel, is an aspiring actor who drops out of medical school after realizing that he doesn’t feel passionate about being a doctor. (Fainting at the sight of a cadaver can do that.) Kel takes a temp job as a substitute teacher at an all-girls private school to make ends meet while he attends auditions.

Duvernay can relate. He moved from Atlanta to Los Angeles at 19 to pursue acting and, like many actors, did about every odd job imaginable — from Uber Eats, Postmates, and DoorDash driver to dishwasher, server, and barback — to get by. “You just keep moving around to find ways to make more money, and that’s a lot of what the show is about: work-life balance,” he says. “If I make more money, I’ll have more free time because I’ll have to work fewer days, and then I can go to these acting classes or I can try and make these auditions.”

A key difference between him and his Not Suitable for Work character, however, is that while Kel must navigate his parents’ disapproval of his chosen profession, Duvernay’s family is the reason he’s acting today. When he was about 9 years old, he acted out different scenarios and cried on cue to them. They immediately clocked that their son had a gift and encouraged him to study acting and perform in showcases. For years, Duvernay went along with it, wanting to make his mom and dad happy, until he had his own epiphany doing theater his senior year of high school.

“Being on the stage is such an unbelievable feeling, because it’s live — it’s like electricity coursing through everyone’s veins at the same time, and you’re moving as one, and you hear the crowd react,” he says. “That’s really when I felt the fullness of what it could be for me — like, wow, my parents kind of cooked. They knew I was supposed to do this.”

1 / 2In his seven years in LA, Duvernay has put together an impressive resume. He landed a recurring role in Peacock’s Bel-Air and had a supporting part in Netflix’s popular romantic drama Purple Hearts. But his breakout moment came in 2025 when he portrayed Zion, the son of Natasha Rothwell’s Belinda, in The White Lotus Season 3. “The White Lotus, it’s huge. It felt like that when I was auditioning for it, it felt like that when I was filming, it felt like that when it was coming out, and it still feels like that for me,” he says.

He still keeps in touch with the cast — he even has a workout-theme group chat going with co-stars Patrick Schwarzenegger and Arnas Fedaravičius — and says he’d “absolutely” do another season if Mike White came calling (“100 times, yes. I would drop everything I’m doing,” he says). In addition to the friends and the career boost in Hollywood, the show offered plenty of self-discovery.

“Everyone’s telling you [that] you’re attached to a rocket — just buckle up and get ready — and you then have this expectation the whole time you’re filming it, like, ‘Who am I? I need to figure out who I am right now, because I don’t want to get out there into the world and do myself a disservice because now I’m playing someone else,’” he says. “That was my big thing. I really wanted to find out who I was, but it’s funny because… I don’t think we ever truly know.”

It’s why Duvernay approaches his career as “an open book,” ready to learn and evolve with each new opportunity that comes his way — whether that’s as Jeremy in The Love Hypothesis, his role in an upcoming “time loop action shark movie,” or in a potential second season of Not Suitable for Work.

“The more open we are to the possibilities, the more that is to come to us,” he says, leaning back, thinking for a moment. “I just want to be happy, I want to be fulfilled, and I want to pour into my friends, my family, and my