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 POWER OF THE PENN
The star of Van Wilder, Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle and other marijuana-and-bodily-fluid-based comedies, shows us his more serious side in the new-to-DVD The Namesake, based on the best-selling novel by Jhumpa Lahiri
Kal Penn was glad to find that the better roles in Hollywood often transcend categories of race and ethnicity. But will audiences buy this from the guy who once had a love scene with a bag of weed? We caught up with Penn on the set of House to find out.
INSTINCT: I loved The Namesake. Tell me about your character. He’s got a really interesting name.
KAL PENN: He’s this kid who grew up in upstate New York. He’s an American kid of Indian descent. Unlike a lot of the people around him, he’s probably the only one who’s really comfortable with himself, but everyone constantly questions whether or not he should be put in specific category. He’s named Gogol because of his dad’s particular attachment to the Russian author Nikolai Gogol. And growing up he was always cool with the name, until high school, when he’s tormented by being named after this dysfunctional Russian author. His whole life he’s constantly finding that balance between other peoples’ desire to put him in a neat little box and his desire to be who he is.
Do you think it’s a struggle for identity or just that he has parents from another country with a conflicting cultures?
I think it’s a great combination of all those things, and that’s what I credit both [director] Mira Nair and Jhumpa Lahiri. It’s so easy to get trapped into identity politics, and I find as an actor that the better stories transcend that. And I think that you’ve got to tell a story legitimately whether this character is Chinese, Italian, white, black or whatever. We identify with it because of the family story and the aspects of fitting in that everyone has felt at one time or another.
Working with director Mira Nair must have been something of a dream come true as an actor.
Definitely. She directed a film called Mississippi Masala with Denzel Washington, and in seventh grade I went to go see it with my parents. It was the first time I had seen anyone who sort of…looked like me on screen. Up until this point it was all like Apu on The Simpsons or Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom. There had never been any fleshed-out characters, and I immediately thought If she can do this, I can do this. I want to be a storyteller. I want to play compelling characters, and I actually credit her with my decision to become an actor.
We hear you’re a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania. How did that come about?
I do guest lectures on the side. It doesn’t even have that much to do with acting. In college I started studying media theory. I was a sociology and a film major. And I always was interested in how pop culture comes together with history and race and representation and gender and sexuality and nationality and all those things. So it was just something I had been lecturing on separately on the side at colleges, and it just kind of came together.
You’re also working on the TV show House right now. How’s that going?
Yeah, it’s great. I’m playing a doctor. House hired 40 new fellowship applicants, and he’s gonna whittle it down to between two and four new doctors. They basically did something similar to what they did on 24 last year. They don’t tell us exactly how many episodes, so you’ve got these 40 actors who’ve got no idea if they’re gonna be there for a week or nine months. It’s actually a really cool exercise.
The new Harold & Kumar comes out in February. What’s going on in this one?
They’re not going to White Castle. [Laughs] It’s tentatively called Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.
Oh, really? That’s awesome.
It starts off 30 seconds after the last one. They get on the plane to go to Amsterdam, and they’re mistaken for terrorists and sent to Guantanamo Bay.
Oh, my God.
So they have to escape from Guantanamo and basically try to clear their names with the federal government before they can leave the country to go to Amsterdam. Just like the first one, where…it’s not about White Castle, it’s more about the journey.
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See Kal get his serious actor on in The Namesake, now available on DVD
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Instinct Online 
written by Kina on December 16, 2007
I think he is really hot and glad that he got this really cool part!