Ready for the challenge

It’s barely 4pm and Kal Penn can scarcely stay awake. His eyes have already taken on a suspicious shade of red. Before any conclusions are drawn, he clarifies jet lag has gotten the better of him. It had only been a couple of hours since the Indian-American actor had touched down in Mumbai to attend the premiere of his film Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain . He arrives at a city radio station for an interaction, but doubts he can survive till the screening that night. He politely pleads with the publicity team of the film to not make him sit through the entire event. “I’d really love to watch the film. I really would. But I might not be able to stay awake,” he begs.

His wish is granted. But not before he’s made to give a tonne of back-to-back press interviews, most of which sound more like a verification process of his desi credentials. The actor, whose original name is Kalpen Modi, hits all the right notes. He dutifully throws in a few lines in Gujarati, expresses his love for dhoklas and Amitabh Bachchan, and laughs off questions on sharing his last name with Narendra Modi. “No relation there,” he says with a grin. Finer details — such as the name of the Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister — have been provided to him on a piece of paper and the seasoned actor reads them aloud with confidence.

He does remarkably well, until he’s asked to recite his favourite Hindi film dialogue. Seeing that his wit can’t bail him out of this one, he accepts defeat. His rehearsal for Bhopal also began on a similar note. “I got the script in English. All my conversations with the director (Ravi Kumar) were in English. There was nothing in Hindi in the script. I had rehearsed on my own in Los Angeles before travelling to India. I did the first scene and the director said ‘ Abhi Hindi main ’,” he recalls. While his Gujarati is fluent, Penn doesn’t know Hindi. He can’t make it through a Bollywood film without subtitles. He enlisted the help of his cousins in India and a dialect coach to play the role of Motwani, a local reporter who witnessed the tragedy. There were, however, moments when he contemplated taking the next flight home to Los Angeles. “I wouldn’t call them fleeting moments. I would call them all-encompassing desires. But then the director said something that you should never tell an actor. ‘Are you not up to the challenge?’” he says.

In the film, Penn manages a sincere performance, but he is without doubt an odd choice for the role. Even the auto driver who tricked him into a Mumbai darshan during his last visit here knows that. “I think the American accent with which I speak Hindi was probably why he took me for a ride,” he admits.

Yet, within the limited roles offered to Indian-American actors in Hollywood — a cabbie, a fresh-off-the-boat village bumpkin and a geek — Penn pushed the boundaries. His most notable roles are Gogol in Mira Nair’s The Namesake and Kumar in the stoner-comedy series Harold and Kumar . More recently, he has starred in TV series like How I Met Your Mother and 24 . “I still get asked to audition for things that are ridiculous and stereotypical. It’s a big thing there,” he says. His next TV show, Battle Creek , made by the creators of the hit show Breaking Bad, will see him play a detective for the first time. He’s looking forward to this new experiment. As for Indian films, they are nowhere on the radar as of now. Perhaps his tryst with Hindi dialogues will take a while to recover from.

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