When Kal Penn, born Kalpen Modi, decided to split his first name and add an extra ‘n’, it wasn’t an actor’s obsession with numerology but a brown person in America taking a subtle jab at Hollywood’s fixation with hokey accents and turbans. “I joke that the ‘n’ stands for ‘not going to play a stereotypical cab driver.” Frank and refreshingly free of movie star airs, the 44-year-old Indian American actor spoke to Mohua Das about some honest and wildly funny stories that have gone into the making of his memoir, You Can’t Be Serious
Mohua Das (THE TIMES OF INDIA; January 2, 2022)

The book is loaded with funny footnotes. Did it occur to you that nobody actually reads footnotes?
Yes, it did occur to me! A lot of comedic nuggets are in the footnotes and if you ignore them you won’t get all the jokes. So, there’s just one part in the book that my parents had a problem with. It was a joke that I made in a footnote about a close cousin. We’ve been playing pranks on each other for years. I decided to tell people in the book that he got gonorrhea (grins) and in the footnote I say, he certainly didn’t. But then, nobody reads footnotes and I’ve won the prank contest now!

Be it the kid in kindergarten who called you the N-word or aunties who rolled their eyes when you told them that you were going to arts school — if you could have a conversation with them now, what would you tell them?
I guess everything in in the book! (laughs) Much of what kids see and hear comes from some of the things they’re exposed to on TV and the lack thereof. The only exposure they had to anyone who looked like me was Apu from The Simpsons or people from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Much has changed since then so I don’t think I have to go back and say anything to them. They have TV! As for the aunties. . . I can’t imagine what it’s like to move halfway around the world, away from your family in your 20s at a time when you couldn’t even make a phone call. I feel silly that I never considered that when I was growing up. So, aunties and uncles in a place like America where your parents are immigrants are a support network because ten people are there to cheer you on. On the downside, you have ten people trying to give you advice!

As a brown actor in America, race and identity issues lie at the heart of your book… A lot of stories especially earlier in my career are about race and misogyny at the movie studio but then I put that in the context of today and how wonderful it is to see how things have progressed.
I couldn’t have dreamt of turning on the TV 15 years ago and seeing the types of projects out there today — Mindy Kaling has three shows, Hasan Minhaj is sold out, there are so many sketch comedy artistes who are all South Asians or desis. It all comes down to the fact that audiences want content that is diverse, authentic, slice of life and get to meet characters that they’re either meeting or not meeting in real life.

You put your acting career on hold to work for the Barack Obama administration for a year and then extended it. Why was that?
My commitment was for a year but in the first year I realised that the government moves very slowly in a democracy. The things that I was working on — the Affordable Care Act, repeal of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell act — I wanted to see them through and so I extended for a second year. I also got appointed to the president’s committee on the arts and humanities and was able to work on arts education and cultural diplomacy.

What do you miss about working at the White House?
On a serious side, you miss the opportunity to do really good work for people and being humbled every day that you walk into that building. On the flip side, I had to police my overly creative brain. Like, in my second week, I got looped into an email from the President’s National Security Council. The document said, ‘Kal you need to know about the Moro Islamic Liberation Front’ acronymed MILF. How MILF is highly dangerous and MILF recruits young men! Laughing my butt out in the office I hit reply without thinking and said, ‘Their main terror group is the MILF?’ Nobody replied to that email until about an hour later a senior bureaucrat wrote back, ‘Looks like Kal is in the House!’ (Laughs) It reminded me that there’s a time to be serious and a time to be funny and I loved finding that balance.

Your coming out is not something you dwell much on in the book. Why is that?
I didn’t think it was the most interesting chapter. It was too easy to write. The harder stuff to write was about the racist directors and the rage I had while working for them or helping Obama — the first sitting president — plan the first-ever Diwali. There are lots of stories about me that people didn’t know. Like how my grandparents marching with Mahatma Gandhi is tied to my public service at the White House…these are the stories that I felt would resonate.