Twenty years after Harold & Kumar, the actor talks to High Times about meeting Cheech for the first time, the strain deal he never got and what a Jimmy John’s sandwich campaign says about where cannabis culture actually is right now.
Nobody offers Anthony Hopkins free meat.
“People aren’t like, ‘Oh, I saw Silence of the Lambs, here’s free meat,’” Kal Penn says. “We’re the ones who get our version of that.”
He means weed. Everywhere. Every city, every country, every situation where a stranger recognizes him and decides this is the moment. A friend once asked him, after watching someone offer him a joint on the street, whether that happened everywhere he went.
“Yes.”
There are worse occupational hazards.
“Were John Cho and I just that good that you believe that 20 years later I am high right now? I love that, by the way. I love all of that.”
John Cho & Kal Penn arriving to “Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas” Los Angeles Premiere on November 02, 2011 in Hollywood, CA – Photo via Shutterstock
Five Kids Walk Into a Phish Concert
Penn grew up in suburban New Jersey in the ’90s, which explains more than you’d think about how Kumar happened.
“I think everybody’s relationship with cannabis starts with the five friends in your high school who went to Phish concerts,” he says. “That’s just always the starting point for it.”
Evan Osherow from Bowie, AZ, USA, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
When he and Harold & Kumar creators John Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg were figuring out what music Kumar would listen to, all three of them landed on Phish at the same time. They were drawing on the same five kids.
The films became the strongest overlap …
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Author: Javier Hasse / High Times
