The 'rise' of Kal Penn in Hollywood

New York: This year has been a banner year for actor Kal Penn as he has established himself as the Indian face in Hollywood. Penn completed Mira Nair's The Namesake, in which he plays the lead role as Gogol Ganguli. But there's a lot more going on with him. CNN-IBN correspondent Anirudh Bhattacharyya met Penn at the New York premiere of The Namesake.

Anirudh Bhattacharyya: Is there something special about The Namesake that you would like to share? Do you relate it with Jhumpa Lahiri’s book by the same name and the character of Gogol Ganguly that you play in the film?

Kal Penn: I actually relate to the film much in the same way that I relate to the Catcher in the Rye when I read it in high school. There is something about the characters as individuals as opposed to something about the names.

Anirudh Bhattacharyya: Tell us about your film Rise of Taj releasing in December. What is it about?

Kal Penn: The Rise of Taj is a completely different type of film. It is a spin off movie from 2002 comedy film called Van Wilder. The film opens on December 1. It’s the same character (the one in Van Wilder) four years later when he becomes the proverbial Van Wilder, the sort of a party guy who teaches a bunch of British kids how to party hard.

Anirudh Bhattacharyya: When you shot for Van Wilder’s Taj (the guy who heads to England's prestigious Oxford University to further his studies) you were kind of offended by the way character gets molded in the film. In this film did you have a lot of say in what Taj was going to be like?

Kal Penn: Yes, we have talked about this before that there were problems that I had with Van Wilder I in terms of finding the character extremist or atypical. I think the great thing about the film, The Rise of Taj, is that it deconstructs the previous notion of who he was.

It’s fours years later and he has assimilated in being comfortable in terms of who he really is. There are lots of jabs on the British culture and the whole post-colonial mentality.

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