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Interview: Kal Penn and John Cho
It’s High Time

Kal Penn and John Cho say portraying Asian-Americans as drug-addled doofuses breaks down stereotypes by putting their characters on an even playing field with the world’s other drug-addled doofuses. Of course, that’s not the only political message in their highly anticipated sequel Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

By Bob Strauss

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was the first movie to feature smart Asian-Americans behaving like the same kind of idiots you find in most Hollywood comedies.

And it was almost the last.

“There was a huge question about whether there would even be a sequel,” admits Kal Penn, who plays the brilliant but bong-addled Indian half of the baked duo. “The first movie didn’t do very well at all at the box office. I think it barely cracked $18-million [U.S.]; it only cost $6-million to make, but they spent more than that on advertising.”

Nevertheless, four years later we have Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, in which Penn’s Kumar Patel and co-star John Cho’s Harold Lee find themselves mistaken for Islamic and North Korean terrorists and pursued from the high security installation to a pants-optional pool party and beyond by clueless but determined feds.

How did this happen?

“When [White Castle] came out on DVD, fans bought it for each other and rented it when they had people coming over,” Penn explains via phone from Nevada, where he’s doing college outreach work for the Barack Obama campaign while his hit TV series House is on hiatus because of the writers strike. “It developed this huge cult following, without which we certainly would not have been able to make the second one.”

John Cho (left) and Kal Penn

“I have gotten a lot of, as they say, props on the street, which has been great,” says the Seoul-born, L.A.-raised Cho from his dressing room on the set of the upcoming Star Trek movie. He plays the young Mr. Sulu during his Starfleet Academy days. “I would say younger Asian-Americans really appreciate it. As for older Asian-Americans, they’re more interested in noble depictions, and I’ve always thought that the problem with that is that it’s not particularly human. I always wanted to find the flawed character. That always seems more real and more like you, and I think that’s what the kids responded to. “God, I must be old because I’m referring to them as kids!” laments Cho, 35. “So I think they appreciated that. And all the vulgarity. And the crime, really; let’s face it.”   As the sequel’s title indicates, Harold and Kumar get into much hotter water this time around.

“The second movie picks up where the first movie left off,” Cho explains. “We’re trying to get to Amsterdam and Kumar has snuck a bong onto the plane because he can’t even go that long without being high. Anyway, that gets mistaken for a bomb, we get sent to Guantanamo Bay and it’s just ridiculousness from there.”

Obviously, HK/G-Bay brings the underlying racial and political humour of the series to the forefront. And while Cho and Penn welcomed the enhanced absurdity, both seemed a little concerned about offending potential customers, especially during a U.S. election year when race is a factor like it’s never been before.

“There’s definitely a lot of political satire in this one,” acknowledges New Jerseyite Penn, who turns 31 this month. “I’m a big politics buff, and when I read this script I thought it was awesome that we got to play with all of these different layers. But it’s certainly from a non-partisan angle, we’re not making fun of Democrats or Republicans at all. We’re just making fun of how things are in the country right now.”

“I’m not sure that the movie really takes a hardline political stance on anything,” Cho says. “It just seemed like a fun way to get them in a whole mess of trouble, more than anything else, to really increase the stakes. But, personally? I love that angle. It makes the movie a little bit more alive for me, connects it to our time a little bit stronger.”

Despite its limited box office, White Castle made its stars bankable in Hollywood.

Beside the House gig, since the movie came out Penn has done a run of 24 episodes, had a small part in Superman Returns, headlined several other stupid comedies, and got raves for his lead role in the adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s beloved novel The Namesake. Cho, who first became noticed in the American Pie films and acclaimed ethnic indies such as Yellow and Better Luck Tomorrow, has been a ubiquitous TV guest star, and in Sulu is reviving what may be the best-known Asian TV character of all. Their work schedules have kept the guys apart, mostly, for the past four years. But they’d get together more if they could. “We’re real friends, although we don’t see as much of each other as we’d like,” Cho says. “We didn’t know each other prior to the first movie, but we became friends and have remained in touch.”

“John’s awesome,” Penn enthuses. “It’s funny; I think it was after the first couple of weeks of shooting that we both realized we each could have pretended that we liked each other, but it was kind of cool that we actually got along.”

Not that they’re anything like one another, or their movie roles.

“We’re really closer to each other’s characters, meaning Kal’s more reserved,” Cho says. “He’s so much more of a Harold in real life and I’m much more of a Kumar. It’s kind of like, on set, I was trying to do him.”

“It throws people off when they meet us on the street,” Penn says.

As Penn heads back out on the campaign trail, the question once again arises about why a goofy stoner comedy has meant so much to an underrepresented seg­­ment of the movie-going market.

“I kind of grew up without any people in the media who looked like me, so I completely understand the sentiment,” Penn says. “The only real images I remember seeing were Apu from The Simpsons and all the guys in brownface in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom eating monkey brains. And neither . . . well, one’s a cartoon, and the other is just racist and inaccurate.

“So, of course, it’s great that there’s finally a movie about guys doing what guys do,” adds Penn, “and it just so happens that these guys happen to be Korean and Indian.”

Bob Strauss writes about movies and entertainment from his home in Los Angeles. 

Neil Patrick Harris rides high One of the funniest parts of 2004’s Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was Neil Patrick Harris’s parody of, well, Neil Patrick Harris. Harris, the former child star best known as TV’s Doogie Howser, M.D., played a version of himself as a lecherous, skirt-chasing, druggie who snorts cocaine off of a stripper’s chest. Harris is back for the sequel, and while a lot has changed for actor Neil Patrick Harris since White Castle was released — specifically that he came out as a gay man — not much seems to have changed for Neil Patrick Harris, the character, in this sequel that picks up exactly where the first movie left off.   As Harris told New York Magazine, “It’s the very next day, so I’m still the same Neil Patrick Harris you saw before.” And he told Hollywood.com, “I might brand my initials on the ass of a stripper.”