Interview By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

When Kal Penn walks into the room, something seems different about him. You might expect the slacker from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, or maybe the goofball from Van Wilder. But no ' he's well-dressed, well-spoken, and completely amiable. He speaks very thoughtfully, and he mentions his desire to take more dramatic roles almost immediately. Heck, at one point he even tries to debate someone on whether Kumar was a stoner or not: "They don't actually smoke weed that much over the course of the film. I'm serious'the goal is actually to get hamburgers."

Of course, if you knew that he was starring in the new Mira Nair-directed drama The Namesake, you might have expected this complete departure from his previous comedic creations. An adaptation of the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, it stars Penn as Gogol, an Indian-American who rediscovers his heritage. It's a family drama, and Penn's first big serious role ' from the director of such well received fare as Monsoon Wedding and Vanity Fair, too.

So it makes sense that Penn would want to come off as a serious professional. Earlier this year he guest-starred in dramatic roles on 24 and Law and Order: SVU, and even mentions his desire to more actively seek out potential material. At one point, when someone asks him if he's worried his head-shaving scene in The Namesake would remind people of Britney Spears, he replies with a curt, "No." In other words: this is Kal Penn, Serious Actor. He fits the part remarkably well.

"The goal has always been to not just do one genre of film or TV or anything. So having had the opportunity to do that, absolutely," he says. "I want to keep doing both. It's a very conscious decision. And I'm thankful I've had the opportunity to do it."

Penn's journey with The Namesake began at an unlikely point: through John Cho, his friend and costar in Harold and Kumar. "John recommended the book. We were both huge fans of Jhumpa's first book, Interpreter of Maladies, and for some reason I had missed the release of The Namesake, so John insisted that I go out and get it, and I read it and loved it. We immediately tried to get the rights to turn it into a film, and found out that Mira had beaten us to it, thankfully, because we have no idea how to turn something that beautiful into a film."

However, for Penn, the project almost ended before it could begin: he hadn't been cast yet, after all. "Once I found out Mira had gotten the job, I started this really aggressive campaign of trying to get in for an audition. I called her office myself, and I had my agent and manager just barraged her office with phone calls, and there was a casting director who we tried to contact, and nobody was calling us back. So I wrote her a letter, just telling her why I wanted this part, and she was a huge influence in my decision to be an actor in the first place ' and there was still no callback. And it seems that the reason that I finally got the call to audition is because of her son and her agent's son, both of whom are huge fans of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, and insisted that their parents let me come in to audition. So they're now my best friends."

Looks like those comedy roles paid off after all.

Once cast, Penn found himself working extensively on the project to make sure he did as well as possible. Concerning the source material, Penn "always carried a copy of it with me, at work and at home. It's this tattered, written-in., highlighted copy, and I'd base a lot of my preparation for each scene on the novel." Concerning a leap in time the movie makes ' sending his character Gogol from high school to post-college in a matter of minutes ' "I spent about a week and a half at Yale, and a couple days at Columbia, where he goes to grad school." Superfluous research or dedicated character analysis' His comments about Gogol lead one toward the latter: "He's oddly self-absorbed. And I think a lot of that self-absorption takes place at Yale."

Penn certainly has some similarities to his character, being a first-generation Indian American. "Both my parents worked, so it's different in that sense from Ashima and Ashoke [the parents in the movie]. I've never really struggled with my identity ' I guess that's more Ashima's character than Gogol anyway ' but it's the same way with me. I'm an American kid of Indian descent, and that's pretty much all there is to it, there's no greater issue there."

His character is named after the author Nikolai Gogol, and he's asked what authors he himself has been influenced by. "I'm a big reader. Growing up, The Catcher in the Rye was a big influence. I compare The Namesake to Catcher in the Rye a lot, because of my attachment to the character. In eighth or ninth grade or whenever I read it, I was really drawn to the character of Holden Caulfield. My monologue for some of my film and theater school applications was the beginning of chapter three of The Catcher in the Rye ' it isn't a play, but you can do it as a monologue since the whole book is in first person. Obviously I'm not a rich white kid from New England who went to boarding school, but there was something intangible about Holden Caulfield that speaks to you when you're fourteen, and I think the same is true of Gogol ' you don't have to be an American kid of Indian descent to attach yourself to that character and to find something interesting about him."

Has his ethnicity ever made it frustrating to get more roles in Hollywood' "I think every actor is frustrated, right' There are so many actors who can do so much, and there are so little opportunities for any actor ' but when you add things like race, gender, ethnicity, obviously the opportunity pool gets a lot smaller. So it's simultaneously frustrating and rewarding. Because when you do have the opportunity to play those parts, it's extremely rewarding."

Luckily for his fans, though, Penn hasn't abandoned comedy completely. "I'm working on the sequel to Harold and Kumar right now, in Louisiana, so that goes until the middle of March. And I'm shooting a pilot for ABC called The Call. It's being produced by the guys who did 24. It's a half-hour single-camera comedy about two EMTs in Los Angeles. And then we'll see what happens after that." With a career as purposefully unconventional as Penn's, it's anyone's guess.