1?In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield hires a prostitute named Sunny and all they do is talk. Of course, a white American prostitute named Sunny is very different from an Indian American stripper named Sunny, but this is otherwise a fairly smart literary reference for such a dumb story and you should be impressed.
CHAPTER TEN LIVING THE DREAM
“Don’t you ever regret doing Van Wilder?” is a question I’m asked every so often, by a newer generation of South Asians who have the privilege of seeing the world through today’s vacuum. Answering this question is exciting because it signifies the progress of the last two decades. Do I wish my first movie was an action film in which I played a super-hot marine who saves the world from bad guys parachuting out of the sky? Of course. But I’m pretty sure Chris Hemsworth did that in Red Dawn. Not only did I genuinely enjoy working on Van Wilder （naked back on fire and all）， but without Taj Mahal Badalandabad, there’d be no Harold & Kumar in my life. I have no regrets. Here’s why.
I was at an outdoor bar at the farmers market on Fairfax Avenue in Hollywood for the birthday party of one of the producers of the Jamie Kennedy film Malibu’s Most Wanted1 when my coworker Billy Rosenberg （then jovial assistant to the birthday boy, now jovial powerhouse Hulu executive!） introduced me to two of his friends: “Meet Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg. They just wrote a script called Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle—a stoner-buddy comedy about the adventures of two friends who go on an accidental road trip to quench their late-night munchies.” （Okay, the way he actually said it sounded more casual.） I managed to say, “Hey guys, nice to meet you!” before Hurwitz blurted out, “Whoa, you don’t have an Indian accent.” I must have given him a pretty dirty look because Jon quickly clarified: He had seen me in Van Wilder and assumed the accent was real,2 so he was doubly impressed that it wasn’t. As we made small talk over a beer, we realized that we both attended public high schools in New Jersey in the mid-nineties, and Hurwitz asked, “Wait a second, did you do Forensics? I think I vaguely remember a kid who looked like you at the New Jersey meets.” Being from New Jersey is like an ethnicity. This was instant bonding.
I thought their White Castle concept was potentially funny, and when the guys sent me their script the next day, my mind was completely blown. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was （and remains） the funniest screenplay I had ever read. The characters were smart and hilarious, and the humor was grounded in the friendship the title characters shared. The scenes were so absurd, in all of the right ways, with the two leads getting super stoned and somehow hang-gliding and riding a cheetah on their quest for hamburgers.
And of course, the biggest surprise of all: Kumar and Harold happen to be Asian American—without goofy accents, karate moves, turbans, or any other easy stereotypes. That’s why Hurwitz was excited to learn that I didn’t have an Indian accent. This was the first time I had ever seen non-stereotypical Asian guys in lead roles, in any film script. Harold even gets the girl!
Why did two funny white guys from New Jersey write a movie with two Asian American lead characters? I called the dudes immediately. Jon told me that he and Hayden had a diverse group of friends in high school3 and college. Whenever they’d watch movies together, they thought it was weird that the Asian or Indian characters would barely speak. So, they just wrote them as leads in a movie themselves.
Respect. Unfortunately, these sweet, naive newbies didn’t understand Hollywood the way I did. “Guys, this script is really awesome,” I told them, “but you’re new to LA. There’s no way a studio is going to buy this thing.” I was trying to be helpful. A few years earlier, two Asian American writers I knew were offered sour deals—told by studios that their scripts would be purchased as long as the Asian and Indian lead characters were changed to white ones. In both cases, they said no, opting instead to scrape together the cash to self-finance their films. “When nobody buys Harold & Kumar,” I told Hurwitz and Schlossberg, “let’s just do it ourselves. I’d love to help raise the money to make this independently. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read.”
The guys shut me down hard. “Kal, the script goes out to the market next week. We are going to sell it to a studio. And we’re not going to change any ethnicities, or the spirit of the characters. We want to make Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, not David & Jason Go to McDonald’s.”
A week later, Hurwitz called me. They had actually done it: Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle was sold to a company called Senator, with New Line Cinema distributing. Nobody asked them to change the ethnicity of the characters, and nobody would have to scrape together cash to fund the film independently. That’s because two junior executives at New Line （one white, one black, both young） were given the opportunity to green-light and develop a lower-budget comedy. This is what they chose. It was perceived as a business risk, but they understood the characters and the world being created.
I’m wrong about a lot of things, and this time being wrong about the sale of the Harold & Kumar script made me happy. Knowing a film like this would exist in the world felt like a huge leap of progress, whether I could ultimately be involved in it or not. （But really, I needed to convince them to let me play Kumar.）
* * *
Just because I knew the guys who created the characters obviously didn’t mean I was going to be handed the part. The auditions for Harold & Kumar were lengthy. Casting director Cassandra Kulukundis extended an especially wide net, getting submissions from around the world: New York, Chicago, London, Toronto, Sydney, Los Angeles. With plenty of qualified actors hoping to play the lead roles, the process was tedious. Opportunities like this hadn’t just been few or far between for Asian American actors, they were nonexistent. This was the first. As the list narrowed, there were multiple rounds of callbacks held on the third floor of a black office building close to the beach in Santa Monica. Jon and Hayden were always there, along with director Danny Leiner, producer Greg Shapiro, and Cassandra’s team. As with most callbacks, the closer you got to booking the role, the more people it seemed were in the audition room.
The opportunity to play a protagonist in a hilarious buddy comedy was a big part of my dream. I had never wanted a role so badly, so I intended to focus everything I had on earning it. Cassandra had given me a few character notes during the earlier auditions, which I wrote in the margins of the script （also known as audition sides）。 I’d wake up, work on the audition sides, go to the gym, work on the audition sides, make breakfast, work on the audition sides, shower, work on the audition sides. I felt like Rocky, except with audition sides. And a super-average body.
My experience and formal training helped me focus, and I pushed through the first four rounds. The last round was a chemistry test, like the one I had with Ryan Reynolds and Facey McPainty for Van Wilder. It came down to three actors for Harold and three for Kumar. All of us would sit in a waiting room together for an entire afternoon. We’d get called in—in pairs—to see who had the best chemistry: each choice for Kumar reading with each choice for Harold. They were looking for their perfect couple, their Brangelina, their Bennifer, their Haroldumar.4