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Recently Released In Theaters Reviews
2008 FALL MOVIE PREVIEW Bangkok Dangerous Mister Foe Everybody Wants to be Italian Babylon A.D. College Disaster Movie Traitor Hamlet 2 The House Bunny The Longshots Death Race The Rocker Tropic Thunder Mirrors Recently Added Spotlights Nicolas Cage Anna Faris Katharine McPhee Emma Stone James Franco Seth Rogen Rosie Perez Danny McBride Matthew Goode Will Ferrell John C. Reilly Heath Ledger Christian Bale Aaron Eckhart Maggie Gyllenhaal |
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Interview By: Michael Dance 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 ... |
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