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 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 ... |
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