Ellen Gray: 'House's' Penn teaches at Penn

HOUSE. 9 tonight, Channel 29.

SANTA MONICA, Calif. - He's played a stoner in the "Harold & Kumar" movies, a terrorist on Fox's "24" and a first-generation American in "The Namesake," and yet the closest Kal Penn's ever come to fulfilling a stereotype for an actor of Indian ancestry might be on Fox's "House," where he's a doctor.

Except that the doctor, as written, was "certainly Jewish," according to "House" executive producer Katie Jacobs, who said Penn was cast as Dr. Lawrence Kutner after first reading for the part of a Mormon doctor who was another of the would-be disciples of the series' Dr. Gregory House (Hugh Laurie).

That part eventually went to a Kenyan-born actor, Edi Gathegi, but "we loved [Penn] so much that we thought he would work great in the cast of the show, so we cast him as Kutner without having him read for Kutner because we were huge fans and we knew he could do it," Jacobs recalled at a Fox party earlier this month.

It's the kind of casting that's gradually changing the face of television, but it's not necessarily an example Penn would have included in the course he taught this past spring at the University of Pennsylvania on "Images of Asian-Americans in the Media."

"The point of the course wasn't for it to be from my perspective," said Penn in a separate interview at the party on the Santa Monica Pier.

"I actually wanted to make sure that the information we were presenting was completely balanced, so when we talked a lot about gender theory or even diversity itself . . . I pulled articles from some more conservative newspapers or magazines that talked about the free marketeerist [belief] that the market will correct for diversity, and then contrast that with somebody like Bell Hooks, or theory on Spike Lee's films and how you need a certain amount of diversity in order to really reflect what America actually looks like," he said.

"I tried to keep my own career away from it," said the 31-year-old actor, who, according to Penn's Daily Pennsylvanian, taught under his birth name, Kalpen Modi.

The course grew out of lectures he's delivered in recent years "on media studies, conglomeration, diversity, things like that," Penn said.

"I double-majored in sociology [and film, at the University of California at Los Angeles], so as I started working, I started writing and doing a little research on the inside workings of the entertainment industry," he said.

"How I fit into it, I guess, is having that kind of unique perspective, of . . . seeing all the things, the changes that are going on," Penn said.

"The example that always comes into my head is 'Howard & Kumar Go to White Castle" is a movie that, if you look at a more archaic studio [model], that's a movie that never should have been made, right? Because it's two guys who don't look like the typical leads in movies. And yet the studio, New Line, took a risk, a perceived risk, in making that. It was very, very profitable for them, and they were able to make a second one, but without the . . . creative input of Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, the two guys who wrote the script, it never would have gotten off the ground at all."

That said, Penn's not looking to make a point about diversity when he chooses roles.

"I try not to represent a full range of anything," he said. "I'm not a fan of that cultural ambassadorship. I think it overly simplifies everything, and quite honestly, more than that, it's just boring. The joy of being an actor is being able to interpret different characters." *

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