Actor and former White House staffer Kal Penn is known to many as a prolific comedy actor and rightly so. Many of us have laughed our lungs out watching him in the stoner comedy ‘Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle’. Penn was a guest at the latest Express Adda on Friday where he opened up about how his breakout role as Kumar almost derailed his chances of being cast in Mira Nair’s acclaimed film ‘The Namesake’.
While some of his early roles were frustrating, Penn said they were stepping stones that led him to more meaningful work. “In hindsight, those choices paved the way for what I really wanted to do,” he said. At the Adda, Penn reflected on his struggle against stereotypical roles in the early 2000s, including his role as Taj Mahal in ‘Van Wilder’. “That gig helped me land ‘Harold & Kumar’, which in turn nearly cost me ‘The Namesake’,” he said.
14-year-old Zohran Mamdani to the rescue
Penn, who has long considered ‘The Namesake’ one of his most meaningful projects, shared that he personally wrote to director Mira Nair asking to audition for the film. “She was a role model growing up. The book was incredible and I just had to be part of the film,” he recalled. Interestingly, it was Nair’s then 14-year-old son, Zohran Mamdani, who championed his case.
“Mira was one of the catalysts of why I became an actor. The way I got that role was that I wrote her a letter and I said, ‘The Namesake is an incredible book, and you have to let me audition for it.’ It just so happened that her 14-year-old son (Zohran Mamdani) was a fan of ‘Harold & Kumar’. He told her to cast me and actually showed her clips from the movie. She instantly said, ‘Beta this is clearly not the guy for us,’ but then she got my letter and said, ‘What the heck, because of my son I have to let him audition’,” Penn recalled.
Penn recalls working with Irrfan
The actor also fondly remembered working alongside the late Irrfan Khan. Penn said, “He was incredible. He had this power of communicating through silence.” Recalling a scene from ‘The Namesake’, Penn added, “There is this one scene, when he comes into my room in college to give a book, and he just uses silence to show what his character is feeling. He does something similar when we are in a car and he tells Gogol the origin of his name and in both those scenes, there is so little dialogue, but he is such a beautiful and generous performer. We all miss him.”