Indian American actor and producer Kal Penn aka Kalpen Suresh Modi has another tag to his I.D. — professor. Last seen in Mira Nair’s The Namesake, Penn is currently on campus at the University of Pennsylvania, teaching a class on Asian Americans in the Media.
Penn at UPenn (aargh, terrible) hopes to bring the perspective of a Hollywood insider to his class. Amardeep Singh attended an open Q&A session with the actor:
This past Sunday I went down to the University of Pennsylvania for a rare, open Q&A session with Kal Penn. As readers may remember from Anna’s earlier post on the subject, Penn is at Penn this spring, teaching a class on representations of Asian Americans in the Media. He’s also shooting episodes of “House” (go, House), and stumping for Obama in his free time, though with that schedule I’m not sure how he has any.
As I understand it, there was initially some controversy about the class — is this going to be a stunt, or a real asset to a the Asian American Studies curriculum?
To read a February 21 issue of Penn Current which has a feature by Heather A. Davis on a man The New York Times describes as a ‘hip young movie star’ click here.
Finally, Penn’s new movie, Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, is due for an April 25 release. The film revolves around Kumar Patel — a ‘man of colour’ and, therefore, suspicious — being mistaken for a bomb-carrying terrorist (Penn played the role of a teenage terrorist, Ahmed Amar, in the sixth season of the hit TV series 24)while aboard a flight to Amsterdam. Thrown into Guantanamo Bay with his friend Harold (played by John Cho), the duo manage to escape and finally end up in the ranch of George W Bush.
