Heathcliff "Cliff" Gilbert is a recurring character on The Mindy Project (2012), first introduced in season 2. Cliff is a divorce lawyer at Gilbert, Lurie and Shapiro, the law firm down the hall from Mindy's clinic Shulman and Associates, and one of Mindy's more serious love interests. In fact, he is Mindy's last boyfriend before she gets together with her co-worker Danny for the first time.
Cliff Gilbert is portrayed by Glenn Howerton.
Background[]
Cliff meets Mindy when she barges into his office after having tripped over his online shopping delivery boxes on the steps outside the building ("Magic Morgan"). They immediately get off to a rocky start as she reveals she has looked inside his mail and he berates her fashion sense and ignorance about privacy and postal law. They butt heads again, as he goes on to represent Morgan in a sexual harrassment case against her. Morgan takes a liking to Cliff and later senses a vibe between the two of them when Cliff runs into them in the elevator; however, at the time, Mindy has just got over her break up with Casey and is pursuing Jason (Ben Feldman). The two get get closer as Cliff starts to give Danny legal advice about handling his ex-wife's art exhibition of his nudes and prove to share similiar tastes in art to Mindy ("Wiener Night"). When Morgan notices that Mindy is crushing on Cliff but is too low in her self-esteem to actually ask him out, he takes matters into his own hands.
Cliff is engaged in a flirty text conversation with someone he thinks is Mindy but is actually Peter and Morgan on her phone trying to help Mindy out without her knowledge ("You've Got Sext"). As the conversation becomes more suggestive, Cliff decides to come over, so Morgan and Peter throw an impromptu pary at Mindy's place (where they have broken in) to hide the fact that she isn't in and hasn't been texting him. Over the course of the night, Cliff comes to realize that he has been catfished and, frustrated, leaves with Heather, Mindy's neighbour who has been showing an interest in him all night, much to Morgan's dismay as Morgan was secretly into her. As a result, Morgan does not delete the sexting chat from Mindy's phone despite his promise to Cliff, and Mindy realizes what has happened in her absence when she finds her phone again.
Cliff and Heather's relationship does not last very long. When Mindy finds out he's been struggling after a night of fighting as she rides the subway to work with Cliff, she comes up with a scheme to win him in her clinic's Christmas party ("Christmas Party Sex Trap"). She opens it up to the whole building so Cliff can arrive. At the party, Deslaurier tells Cliff that Mindy already has a boyfriend when in fact, when Mindy was telling Deslaurier that she was with someone from the building, she was secretly referring to Cliff and her wish for them to be together. By the end of the night, even though her schemes completely fail, Cliff shows up on the balcony where she's standing alone, talking to a pigeon and reveals that he would like for her to be with him, not the (imaginary) person she's currently with. The two of them kiss for the first time as snow starts to fall and Danny watches on from a window, heartbroken that he didn't take Mindy up on her offer to go to the balcony with him, after he had cheered her up with his dancing.
Shortly after Christmas, Cliff books a holiday for them at a ski resort and it is revealed that Mindy has been having sex with Cliff in situations where he cannot clearly see her naked body because she is extremely insecure about her looks ("Danny Castellano is my Personal Trainer"). In a deleted scene, we find that Mindy has overcome her insecurity to be able to get into a hot tub with him. In a twist however, Cliff is too insecure to take his shirt off after all his holiday feasting and the two of them bond over chocolates and champagne in the tub.
Cliff and Mindy are together for at least three months before the first cracks in their relationship start to appear. Mindy wants to move in together, but Cliff is not ready for such a big decision in that time and when Mindy brings up the rushed pace of her past relationship with Casey, it leaves Cliff insecure ("L.A."). When Mindy goes to LA, where Casey lives, for a medical conference, Cliff asks her not to go out to dinner with him. Mindy agrees but tries to find a loophole out of the situation to attend a pool party with Casey, where the two of them get intimate at night in a swimming pool. When Mindy realizes she has accidentally got herself into a potentially sexual situation, she immediately lays down her boundaries with Casey. Unfortunately, the paparazzi at the event had already posted photographs of them online and Cliff, who is a naturally cynical person from his experiences as a divorce attorney, catches her lie. When they speak over the phone that night, Cliff breaks up with her for being untrustworthy, and they are both clearly deeply affected and hurt.
Cliff has been spending the next day at work moping and crying in his office as he sings along to Jewel's "You Were Meant For Me" trying to get over his heartbreak ("The Desert"). Morgan and Peter, who is back from the L.A. conference while Mindy was tricked into staying behind by Danny, who was going to confront his father for the first time in years and needed the support, overhear him through the vents in the clinic bathroom and immediately realize he and Mindy are broken up. The two of them meet Cliff in the elevator and resolve to give him a good guys' night out. At the bar, it comes out that Cliff was the one who broke up with Mindy, not the other way around, and Morgan and Peter lose their patience and convince him that Mindy never actually cheated on him, that she loves him deeply and is broken up about him leaving her and that the whole pool party incident was a giant misunderstanding. The support of her friends shakes Cliff and when he later receives a heartfelt email from Mindy (unbeknownst to him, the words are Danny's as she struggles with composing the email) begging to be taken back, he forgives her and realizes he wants to get back together.
The next day, he enlists the help of Morgan to perform a grand gesture outside her apartment ("French Me, You Idiot") as she arrives home from the airport (together with Danny, after the two of them had made out for the first time on the flight back to New York) and take her back. Mindy and Cliff are ostensibly back together now; however, Mindy has realized that she's deeply in love with Danny and tries to get out of her relationship with Cliff by getting him to dump her again, for good this time. But try as she might, he is unfazed. Then, his grandmother dies and he turns to Mindy for comfort in his distress. He also requests that she write the eulogy as he was moved by the letter she wrote him in their "break up" and is too distraught to be able to do so himself.
Cliff invites Mindy as well as Danny and Morgan, whom he considers friends, to church for his grandmother's funeral and eulogy. As he begins to read out the eulogy Mindy wrote out for him, a terrible eulogy that he ends up skipping through much of, Danny and Mindy slip away to make out in an antechamber. However, they accidentally knock over a candle and set the place on fire. Cliff takes it on the chin as the fire brigade is called in, but when Mindy reveals that she cheated on him with Danny and wants to be with him, he grows cold, punches Danny in the face and curses them both. We do not see Cliff again until season 3.
From here on out, Cliff's relationship with the doctors is well and truly broken. Whenever he runs into them, he calls them out for being terrible, selfish people and claims that Danny and Mindy are perfect for each other because of how awful they are. However, they keep requiring legal assistance and so Cliff's path crosses with the main cast a few more times.
In season 3, when Mindy has legal trouble with her taxes she contacts Cliff, who at first refuses to help her as he is still angry and hurt by her ("Crimes, Misdemeanors & Ex-BFs"). Mindy pretends she and Danny broke up after he cheated on her, in hopes that Cliff will then help her out of pity. When Cliff believes they are broken up (or at least appears to believe so), he agrees to help her on the condition that she go out to dinner with him to discuss her taxes, like a date. There, he reveals that Danny is technically still married, even though he's been going around saying he's divorced. Mindy is shocked by the revelation and confronts Danny about being hypocritical with which Catholic rules he picks and chooses to apply to himself.
Danny is forced to go to Cliff's office and beg Cliff not only to help Mindy with her tax trouble, but also for him to help Danny finalize his divorce on paper, since he was not legally divorced despite being annulled by the church several months ago. Cliff reveals that he had suspected that Mindy was lying to him about being broken up with Danny based on her social media posts and berates both of them for being self-centred and terrible. He only agrees on the condition that Danny give him his precious NY Yankee stadium seat. Cliff then gets Danny divorced and also advises him to let Mindy leave her things in his apartment, his experience with her telling him that it was odd that Danny's apartment had no traces of her. This had been another source of conflict between Danny and Mindy through the episode and by the end, Danny takes his advice. Finally, Cliff reveals that he did not want the seat because he is a Yankee fan and that he is, in fact, a Red Sox fan who wants to set Danny's precious seat on fire.
Cliff becomes a successful lawyer once a new way of divorces from his gay clients after the legalization of gay marriage start to roll in ("Lahiri Family Values") so he decides to move his firm out of the building to upgrade to a larger space. Mindy finds out he's moving out when she calls him for legal help and later asks him to sell his place to her, as she hopes to start her own private practice and was already looking for a new office.
In season 6, we find out that Cliff has moved to Philadelphia. Mindy ambushes him in his new office to get him to represent her in her divorce, despite the fact that he hates her ("Romantic Decouplement"). After helping Mindy with her divorce he accidentally reveals that he is currently helping Danny with his divorce too, though it is not going so smoothly in his case ("May Divorce Be With You").
Personality[]
Cliff is a successful lawyer and as such, has a cockiness about him, though it does not seem unearned. He frequently finds Mindy and her friends overbearing, interfering and annoying, and, as a somewhat more normal person, calls them out on their selfishness and shenanigans. In the way that Mindy describes her relationship with Cliff, it is clear that there are aspects of him that mirror Danny's grounded level-headedness, though he is perhaps more buttoned-up.[1]
From his practice in divorce law, Cliff is naturally somewhat withdrawn and unable to commit as easily to a serious relationship as Mindy. He holds trust and honesty in high regard, given that he immediately broke up with Mindy when he sees that she lied by omission on something he was rather uncomfortable with (her closeness with her recent ex-fiance), and tends to be rather cynical about marriage.
In later seasons, he appears to have grown very cynical and says his mother made him mistrust women in general.
However, Cliff is still willing to do jobs with for the doctors at Shulman in spite of them refusing to pay him for their services, so he does have an altruistic nature.
Cliff has an online shopping problem.
Relationships[]
Mindy Lahiri[]
(See Mindy and Cliff)
Danny Castellano[]
Morgan Tookers[]
Heather[]
Appearances[]
- S2 E4 Magic Morgan
- S2 E5 Wiener Night
- S2 E8 You've Got Sext
- S2 E9 Mindy Lahiri is a Racist
- S2 E11 Christmas Party Sex Trap
- S2 E12 Danny Castellano is my Personal Trainer
- S2 E13 L.A.
- S2 E14 The Desert
- S2 E15 French Me, You Idiot
- S3 E3 Crimes & Misdemeanors & Ex-BFs
- S3 E16 Lahiri Family Values
- S6 E2 A Romantical Decouplement
- S6 E3 May Divorce Be With You
Trivia[]
- The character and his law firm were named after Cliff Gilbert-Lurie, the famous entertainment lawyer whose client list includes Mindy Kaling.[2]
- Cliff's mom's name is Ellen but all her friends call her 'Cookie.'
- Cliff's law firm moving to Philadelphia is a reference to actor Glenn Howerton being most well-known for his role as one of the stars, co-creators and executive producers on the long-running comedy It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, in which the central characters live in South Philly.