Poured Over: Kal Penn on You Can’t Be Serious

Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.

From this episode:
B&N: John Cho also gives you a copy of one of the best books in the world, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies. It’s a debut collection of stories that won the Pulitzer Prize the year it was published. I mean, it is spectacular story collection. So, you already know Mira Nair, who has created the movie Mississippi Masala, which so many of us love. But this leads you to the next piece of your career, the movie The Namesake, which is unlike anything you’ve done before. Probably a little closer to you in real life, Jersey Boy. Can we talk about that for a second?
KP: Yeah, I came across Jhumpa’s writing because of John Cho. So, both of us are avid readers, John even more so than me to be honest. And he casually when we were shooting — I think when we were shooting Guantanamo Bay — he said, “Hey, man, what do you think of Jhumpa Lahiri?” And I said, “Who?” And he goes, “Come on. You read Interpreter of Maladies, right?” And I said, “No. What’s that?” He goes, “You have to read Interpreter of Maladies.” I was like, “Come on, just what is it?” So I go out, I got it immediately, read it, obviously fell in love with it. And then The Namesake came out shortly thereafter, we both got and read the namesake around the same time. And we called each other and said I mean, we need to turn this into a movie I need to play Gogol. Mira Nair beat us to it, she got the rights to The Namesake. And then I began this really aggressive campaign to get cast. It was, again another long laborious kind of process. And at the end of it when I did finally get cast, I’m not ruining the story because everybody knows I played Gogol. But one of the reasons that I ultimately got cast was because Mira’s son Zohran, who was 14 at the time that we made the movie, was a huge Harold and Kumar fan.
B&N: You really can’t be mad at aunties, but you can marvel at Aunties…I love that story, though. We might just leave it in anyway. (We did –Ed.) You take a step back from your career. And it’s not like you’re in any kind of lull in your career, but you have an opportunity to become a surrogate for the Obama campaign in Iowa. And you start flying back and forth between Los Angeles and Iowa to campaign in– this is ’07. What brought that on? I mean, this is a big part of the book. So obviously, we’re going to let people experience that piece of the book, but I don’t want to ignore it because it’s a big step, and a big change.
B&N: It was a big change. Olivia Wilde, who was on House with me and is a dear friend, she knocked on my dressing room door one day and said, “Hey, I have a plus one to a Barak Obama event, do you want to come?” I was like, “Oh, the Illinois Senator.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I’ve seen you reading his books on set, like you know who he is, you should come.” And I said, “No,” because I knew that it was probably going to be some type of a campaign event. My grandparents who marched with Gandhi had instilled in us these family values of service. It was never politics, it was always service. It was write the letter to your representatives, go to the protest, make your voice heard, do the right thing. It was never, you know, support a politician. And so that just wasn’t on my radar. Olivia really made a strong case, and I decided to go to this event. I was inspired at the event, just by conversations that I had had with Obama and his young staffers. And I thought, all right, Olivia is going to Iowa for three days. I’ll go with her. I’ll go. I’ll go to Des Moines for three days before the Iowa caucuses and I’ll help out. And at the end of those three days, I decided to stay for two or three more days…