Kal Penn wears many hats — actor, author, TV show host, producer and former White House staffer. Most recently, he has been making headlines for reprising the role of Kumar in the upcoming fourth installment in the Harold and Kumar franchise and for the fact that his name for the role of Gogol in Mira Nair’s adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2006) was suggested by New York City’s mayoral candidate and Nair’s son Zohran Mamdani.
Penn will be the guest at Express Adda in Mumbai on Friday. He will be in conversation with Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express Group.
Penn began his acting career in 1998 with Express: Aisle to Glory, but his breakthrough role came only six years later with Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Since then, he has been part of close to 100 productions — films, TV shows and as a host — through which he has consistently made a case for, and broken stereotypes about, South Asian representation in Hollywood. Noteworthy parts include those in House (2004) where he plays Dr Lawrence Kutner, whose identity went beyond his ethnicity, and in Designated Survivor (2016), where he plays the White House Press Secretary Seth Wright. He also starred in the immigration sit-com Sunnyside (2019) which he co-created, and Clarice (2021), the sequel to the 1991 classic thriller The Silence of the Lambs.
Interestingly, for Designated Survivor, he had first-hand experience to borrow from. After advocating for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2007-2008, he went on to become the Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement and Intergovernmental Affairs. As the President’s Liaison to Young Americans, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and the Arts community, he worked on issues such as the repeal of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’, the Affordable Care Act, Pell Grants, arts and culture programmes, the DREAM Act and rapid response to the BP Oil Spill and earthquake in Haiti.
As someone who has always had one foot in acting and the other in activism — he has a double major in films and sociology from UCLA — Penn left the White House in 2010 to film A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas. He returned later that year as the national co-chair for the Obama/ Biden re-election campaign in 2012 and served on the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities, focusing on arts education and cultural diplomacy.
During his second stint at the White House, where he served for nearly seven years, he campaigned for both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, finally resigning in 2017. He also supported 2024 Presidential candidate Kamala Harris.
In 2021, Penn authored his memoir, You Can’t Be Serious, where among other things, he introduced his long-time partner Josh and wrote about his sexuality.
Story continues below this ad
The Express Adda is a series of informal interactions organised by The Indian Express Group and features those at the centre of change. Previous guests at the Adda include Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, philanthropist Bill Gates and Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta.
