"Harold & Kumar" Star is From the Township

[Marc LeVine]

Film Clips: Kal Penn for "National Lamthingy's Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj"

By LOU GAUL
phillyBurbs.com

Kal Penn has these words of advice for any school administrator considering cutting arts programs: Don’t do it.

The 29-year-old actor, whose credits range from the zany “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle” (2004) to the uplifting “Superman Returns” (2006), believes he owes his career to the public school system.

“I went to the Freehold (N.J.) Regional High School District, which has six different high schools, including one for the performing arts,” Penn said at his Philadelphia hotel during a publicity stop for “National Lamthingy’s Van Wilder: The Rise of Taj,” which opens Dec. 1. “You apply and audition to get in, and then it’s encouraged that you pursue a career in the arts.

“It was a wonderful system, because so many public schools talk about cutting arts-education programs and the one I went to was just the opposite.”

When did the Montclair, N.J., native know he wanted to pursue an acting career?

“In the eighth grade, I did ‘The Wiz’ and played the Tin Man,” the 29-year-old actor recalled, “Every day, the students in the play had to take the late bus, and the only other kids riding it were soccer players, who made fun of us for being in the theater program.

“When it came time to do the play, we did scenes in the auditorium for the entire student body, and I thought going home that day would be a nightmare, because the athletes would make fun of us for performing.


“As all of the acting students reluctantly got on the bus, the soccer players started applauding. They loved the show and asked us why we hadn’t told them what we were doing.

“I then realized that magic can happen when you entertain people and touch them emotionally. You can actually change people’s minds about things.”

In “Van Wilder” (2002), Penn plays Taj, an important supporting character seeking to connect with a member of the opposite sex. The R-rated spin-off has the student visiting a university in London and showing uptight British teens how to party.

It has taken Penn a number of years to finally land a lead role, and he credits his tenacity to family members.

“When they were young, my grandparents were active in the Indian independence movement with (Mahatma) Gandhi in India,” he said. “When you’re six or seven years old and your grandparents are telling you about their part in the fight for civil rights, you remember it.

“Their values have stuck with me.”

[Freehold Resident]

Growing up in Wayne as the bright, ambitious son of two high-achieving Indian immigrants, Kalpen Suresh Modi (who would later adopt the stage name Kal Penn) thought that one day he would study international relations. Sure, he had dabbled in acting, even earning a standing ovation in a school production of The Wiz. But neither he nor his parents saw any future in that.

And then, when he was fourteen, Penn happened to see the multi-ethnic romantic comedy Mississippi Masala. The provocative movie, directed by the Indian-born, Harvard-educated filmmaker Mira Nair, made him see international relations—not to mention his own future—in an entirely new light.

“I was like, Wow! I guess I really could do this!” remembers the now 29-year-old Penn. In Nair, “I was seeing someone who had done it—and not just the stereotypical buffoonish stuff, but these awesome stories of characters who just happen to be Indian. Knowing that this existed was inspiring. Here was this role model you could look up to.”

Penn would eventually get the chance to work with Nair. The director’s newly released film, The Namesake, stars the actor in his first dramatic leading role. Based on the best-selling 2004 novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, the movie traces the lives of a couple from Calcutta who live in New York City with their bright, restless, and fully assimilated teenage son, Gogol, portrayed by Penn.

To play the role of Gogol—who heads to Yale to study architecture and begins dating a blonde American girl (Jacinda Barrett from The Human Stain)—Nair auditioned scores of actors from Hollywood and its Mumbai equivalent, Bollywood.

Nair’s fourteen-year-old son, Zohran, insisted she take a look at one of his own heroes—Kal Penn, best known at the time for his antic turn in one of Zohran’s favorite films, the 2004 stoner, gross-out, road-trip, buddy-comedy hit, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle.

Kumar—a likable, libidinous clown who blows off med school to smoke dope and drive around New Jersey in search of girls and munchies—had what Entertainment Weekly called “a motormouth as assaultive as Howard Stern’s.” It was a refreshing turn, a variation on parts he’d played in National Lamthingy’s Van Wilder, Malibu’s Most Wanted, and Love Don’t Cost a Thing.

But Penn has a serious side, and when Nair finally auditioned him, he won her over immediately. “Kal just moved me,” she says. “He was so honest and able to capture Gogol’s angst, Gogol’s awkwardness, and also Gogol’s distinctive coming of age. It’s a role very close to Kal’s heart because he sees it as being about his family and where he comes from. There was a genuine sense right from the start that he owned the role.”

“I saw Gogol as my Holden Caulfield,” says Penn. “Although he’s quite different from me in a lot of ways, Gogol’s internal struggles to find his true identity spoke to me very deeply and very immediately. Both of us are Americans who happen to be of South Asian descent, but that doesn’t define who we are inside. Gogol is more interesting than the color of his skin, and I certainly hope the same is true of me.”

Penn spent much of his childhood in Wayne where, he says, “there was definitely a lot of prejudice in middle school. Then again, I don’t know anyone who loved being in seventh grade.” The family eventually moved to Freehold when Penn (who has a younger brother) was ready for high school. He enrolled in a four-year international studies honor program.

“My dad’s an engineer and my mom’s a fragrance evaluator, so she has a chemistry degree,” Penn says. “I think any parents, but especially immigrant parents who have worked really hard to get somewhere, want you to follow those particular career paths because they’re stable and fruitful.”

But after his Mississippi Masala epiphany, Penn lobbied his parents to let him transfer to Howell High School in Freehold to study performing arts. “It wasn’t like progressive-land, where they were like, ‘Okay, son, go ahead,’” he says. “It was a huge deal at the time, with all the typical dinner-table arguments. But I applied anyway.

“My parents were like, ‘You’re not an idiot, so if you really want to do this, do it.’ I’ve never asked them, but I would imagine they had a conversation one night that was like, ‘If we let him do it now, then it’s a phase and he’ll get over it.’ I’ve been meaning to ask them about that.”

After high school, Penn went to UCLA, from which he graduated in 2002 with a bachelor’s in sociology and a concentration in theater, film, and television. He began hitting the L.A. audition circuit, winning small roles on shows like Buffy, The Vampire Slayer and ER, followed by bigger parts in films like Van Wilder and Superman Returns. As an actor of color, Penn quickly learned that “you have to work a couple hundred times harder just to get your foot in the door.”

On the advice of a few producer and agent friends, he adopted his stage name. “I never changed my name legally,” he notes. “Acting is a business as much as it is an art, so if coming up with a catchy name helps you get jobs, that’s just one part of working. It was never a sore point with my parents, who, like my closest friends, still call me by my real name.”

There was a Jersey connection in Penn’s breakthrough role. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was written by two Randolph natives—Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg—who, like Penn, had moved to Hollywood. Thanks to the raunchy film’s success among teenage and college audiences, Penn spent much of this spring on location in Louisiana filming the Harold & Kumar sequel. At one point, Penn had to dress in drag, not for a scene but so a snapshot could be taken showing Kumar cutting up at a college Halloween party.

“For over an hour he stayed in character and entertained everyone with his improv skills,” says Hurwitz. “It was genius. I love the fact he can be lovable and outrageous at the same time. He’s the perfect blend of intelligence and comedy.”

Though movies are a priority for the young actor, Penn is pursuing a graduate degree in international security at Stanford University when he’s not on set. “I’d like to run for Congress when I’m older,” he says. “It’d be great to be in the House and try to be part of some positive change.”

Hollywood and Stanford have nothing on being home, however. “I try to come back to Jersey as much as possible,” says Penn. “I see friends and family, get really good pizza and Chinese food. And, of course, the highlight—my mom’s amazing cooking.”