WASHINGTON — If the road to White Castle mirrored Dorothy’s path to Emerald City, actor Kal Penn has met his share of crazy characters along the Yellow Brick Road.
Penn used his brain to weather straw-man arguments between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, while serving as liaison to the arts communities for the Obama Administration.
He used his heart to oil the rust off Neil Patrick Harris in the cult favorite flick “Harold & Kumar,” launching an NPH comeback that took him from the Tonys to the Oscars.
And he mustered the courage to star alongside the intense Hugh Laurie in “House, M.D.”
Now, he’s working for a pair of TV wizards — Vince Gilligan of “Breaking Bad” and David Shore of “House” — on the new CBS crime drama “Battle Creek.”
“After the success of ‘Breaking Bad,’ a lot of networks in L.A. were saying, ‘Hey Vince, don’t you have anything else?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, all the stuff you guys said no to years ago,'” Penn tells WTOP. “It was relatively timeless in terms of the concept, so he and David Shore got together and revisited it.”
The show follows two detectives with different views on the world who clean up the streets of Battle Creek, Michigan. If that plot sounds similar to HBO’s “True Detective” (2013), the tone is far lighter.
“It’s an hour-long cop show, but there’s a lot of humor in it,” Penn says. “You’ll see something similar to like if you took ‘Law & Order’ and ‘Brooklyn Nine Nine’ and put them together. … You’ll get your gunfights and car chases and things you want out of a cop show, but there’s also a lot of ridiculousness, and some of the more boring aspects of police work that bring out a lot of humor.”
The show aired its second episode Sunday night, a week after debuting March 1.
Penn plays Detective Fontanelle White, who works alongside the two main stars, Josh Duhamel (“Transformers”) and Dean Winters (“John Wick”).
“He’s a guy who likes to play by the rules ideally, but doesn’t have to if the rules are going to get in the way of trying to nab the suspects,” Penn says. “I’ve never played a cop before, and it’s nice to play someone who’s equal parts action and equal parts comedy.”
Penn’s comedic chops are well known from the “Harold & Kumar” trilogy (2004-2011), which fans reference constantly to Penn out on the street.
“It’s kind of crazy, because when we made those movies, we had no idea that anybody would even watch them,” Penn says. “The first one didn’t do very well in the box office, and it was only because the fans went out and bought them on DVD and gave them to their friends and passed it around that we were able to do a second and third movie. We had no idea these characters would be as loved as they are, and because of that, we obviously love the fans a lot.”
Hear our full interview with Kal Penn below:
