Mr. Penn Goes to Washington
According to Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times, today is the first day on the job for actor Kal Penn (better known as Kumar in the Harold and Kumar films, Gogol in The Namesake and as a U Penn professor of Asian cinema) at the White House. He's working for Valerie Jarrett in the Office of Public Engagement. Every time I picture him at his new post, I think of the scene in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay where he has a tete-a-tete with Dubya and I hyperventilate with laughter. If you are the president, with which tasks do you charge Penn? If you are Penn, what's on your agenda? Apart from Helen Gahagan Douglas, George Murphy and Ronald Reagan, any other actors who went to Washington?
Al Franken starts work tomorrow.— Adam B.- Stuart Smalley and Kumar in the same week! For me, Franken is more TV and radio than Hollywood proper, but of course he counts.— carrierickey
- One cannot forget his film work in Trading Places.— Adam B.
- besides his role in the first Harold and Kumar, this dude has been terrible at acting. Might as well give something else a try— wolfburn
- he has a very attractive, quiet charm in real life as in his character on House; and when he was a speaker hosting fellow actors and writers at UPenn, my friends and I were impressed with how well he facilitated discussion from the background. He was listening closely, esp to the interests and concerns of Asian students. I love the idea of him in the White House! Not least because his sense of humor is likely to fit very nicely with the culture there, where Rahm cracks his knuckles in the ear of POTUS when asked to stop...— cynthiamc
- What about Jane Alexander working at NEA? Does that count?— Nancy KC
- Shirley Temple became an ambassador to Ghana. Does that count?— Bob Ross
M. Night for Indian Ambassador! ps, will airbender be a pricy flop? not sure what market / demographic that odd franchise even caters too...as an indian american, but even more a Philadelphian ---i find myself amongst the rare few who root for him and his films!— theJOJ- Fred Thompson, Fred Grandy (Gopher from The Love Boat), and Sonny Bono all served in Congress— javafiend
- Irene Dunne was appointed to a post at the United Nations by President Eisenhower. And we shouldn't overlook the single most influential intersection between an actor and Presidential politics: John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Abraham Lincoln. (I don't mean that as a tasteless joke, in case it sounds like one.)— wwolfe
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