SANTA MONICA, Calif. — Kal Penn’s character of Dr. Lawrence Kutner on “House” was introduced last season through a game of elimination.
Dr. House (Hugh Laurie) needed to pick a new medical team. He started with a room of potential team members. One or more got eliminated each week.
That’s exactly the way the actors found out if they were going to stay or go.
“We honestly did not know what was going on. Since we did not get our scripts in advance, we would not know until we were ready to start an episode whether we would be back another week or the run had ended,” Penn said during an interview in July.
That kind of uncertainty would suggest anxiety for an actor. Not Penn. He liked not knowing when, or if, his character was going to get the ax. He used that uncertainty to play the character. He survived last year’s medical version of musical chairs to become a regular on the show.
By definition, actors compete for roles. And the situation on “House” (Tuesdays at 7 p.m. MST on KDVR- Channel 31) created the ultimate acting competition. Penn says despite that scenario, there never was any competitiveness among the actors.
“There were 40 of us who started in that first season. We all kept wondering if this was going to turn into something competitive. But we all got along. I think because our characters were so competitive, in our real lives there was nothing short of the most incredible supportive artists’ network,” Penn said.
He would film all week and then hop a plane to Philadelphia, where he was a visiting lecturer in Asian American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The course was called “Images of Asian Americans in the Media.”
The only downside for Penn was that he could not pursue roles in other television shows or movies. Penn has been on “ER,” “24,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “NYPD Blue,” and in films as “Van Wilder,” “Malibu’s Most Wanted” and “Superman Returns.”
Of course, there was one role that put him on the acting map. This interview gets interrupted when a group of fans start yelling “Kumar.” Penn turns, smiles and waves. The New Jersey native has gotten used to the attention from his role in the comedy “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,” his biggest film hit, and its sequel.
Now people stop him to ask for medical advice.
“With the writers from ‘House’ being as simultaneously as creative and intelligent as they are, it has given us a real opportunity to learn about all of these obscure diseases and illnesses that we are diagnosing as the characters,” Penn says.
