Gary Thompson: 'Castle' helped Asian-American actors

"HAROLD AND Kumar Go to White Castle" didn't look like a cultural game-changer when it opened in 2004, but its influence has been quietly substantial.

Starring Kal Penn and John Cho as a kind of Asian-American Hope and Crosby, the movie made a nice pile of money - foremost by being funny, but also by quietly acknowledging our country's changing racial makeup.

Its two regular guy leads - red-blooded, pot-smoking, burger-craving American males - were Korean and Indian.

Penn, who describes himself as "a normal American kid who grew up in New Jersey, watching the same stuff that everybody else was watching," said that growing up he couldn't help but notice a shortage of Asian-American characters. A throwaway character on "The Simpsons," some fake Indian guy on "Seinfeld," but nothing substantial.

It didn't really bother him, but it did strike him as strange that Hollywood was failing to notice change that seemed obvious to everyone else, especially people his age.

"In a lot of movie and TV shows, you just didn't see it. A show like 'Friends.' They're all white, homogenous, and you're not quite sure what they do for a living. It occurred to me that you'd have to go to great lengths to make a show about people who were all essentially the same, when you look around and you see that people are really not the same."

That's why he flipped when he saw the script for "Harold and Kumar," written by a couple of white guys, John Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg, whose characters reflected the multiethnic character of the world they knew.

Penn said it's important that the characters' ethnicity was just part of the movie's wallpaper, never the subject. That's the way the actors approached it.

"It would do a disservice to the characters to think about how unusual it was to have two Asian-Americans in lead roles while we shot it.

"Our job was to make a funny, ridiculous movie that people could enjoy."

"Harold and Kumar" spawned two sequels ("A Very Harold and Kumar 3D Christmas" opens today), and these days there is plenty of work for talents like Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling and Aasif Mandvi.

"If that's true, that's good. We were thinking that if ['Harold and Kumar'] found an audience, it could only be good, and maybe open doors for writers and directors and actors."