Stay Updated on Developing Stories

Oprah gave Mindy Kaling a baby gift that had to be delivered by U-Haul

Story highlights
  • Kaling thought she might be getting flowers
  • Oprah went way bigger than that

(CNN) You can either do things the regular way, or the Oprah way.

Take gift-giving, for example.

Mindy Kaling recently told USA Today that her "A Wrinkle in Time" costar went big to celebrate the birth of Kaling's daughter, Katherine, in December.

Like, way big.

"I got a call from my assistant. She said, 'Oprah's assistant contacted me, she'd like to drop off a present,'" Kaling told the newspaper. "I'm thinking, that's so nice, like, (it's) probably flowers."

Then, she got more details.

"Two men are going to be coming to your house, they said, with a U-Haul truck," recalled Kaling, who also stars in "The Mindy Project."

Suffice it to say, Kaling was excited.

"All you want in life is to hear that two men in a U-Haul truck are coming to your house because Oprah sent them," she said. "I was supposed to go to work that day, (but I was, like), I gotta be here."

When the truck arrived, the gift was hardly a bouquet.

The delivery was "a hand-carved bookcase, prettier than any professional dollhouse you had ever seen that contained a hundred of the classic essential books in children's literature," Kaling said.

Each book had "Katherine's Book Club" on it, a nod to Winfrey's famous book club.

Still, the gift wasn't quite what the media mogul had envisioned, said Winfrey, who'd wanted the furniture piece to look like the treehouse that Kaling's "Wrinkle" character calls home.

"It was the best I could do," Winfrey said.

Outbrain