Harold and Kumar Strike Again!

It’s been a few years since mismatched besties Harold and Kumar, played by Star Trek’s John Cho and funny Kal Penn, first went in search of a yummy White Castle hamburger. We pick them up six years after their last crazy adventure in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas.

Seems the guys have grown apart and have replaced each other with new pals and varying levels of success in life. Both are getting ready for the holidays when Kumar gets a weird, mysterious package on his doorstep. When he tries to send it to Harold’s house, the drug-centric contents along with Harold’s father-in-law’s beloved Christmas tree, go up in smoke.

Harold tries to hide the disaster and ends up on another crazy adventure with Kumar through NYC looking for the perfect replacement tree while stumbling through wickedly insane parties and more trouble than usual. Of course Neil Patrick Harris, a staple in the other two films, is involved.

We got the latest from the duo. John has become a family man since the first film and Kal left the business for a while to work for the Obama administration in Washington, D.C. 

TeenHollywood: Can you talk about your reunion? It’s been a while since the last Harold and Kumar movie.

John: It’s been six years. It was a reunion for Harold and Kumar in the movie. They start out estranged. We loved coming back together but it was also a little bumpy, the adjustment period. The first week of rehearsal was a little iffy. We were working on some script issues. I wasn’t sure if we had the thing back yet. The first week of filming was Harold and Kumar in their new separate worlds and it didn’t feel good, even though it was funny. I didn’t quite feel like we had it and were back together doing our first scene.

Kal: That scene was awesome. It didn’t feel like a Harold and Kumar movie until we were together. Kumar has a new best friend and, in order for him to be believable at that he’s gotta be Kumar to the Nth degree but also unlikable so we can see why they’re friends but also can’t believe that Kumar would deal with being with him or be happy with him and that also shook up the dynamic a bit. This is so strange not being with Harold in all those scenes so when we did finally come together it was pretty cool and a lot of fun.

TeenHollywood: Have you two gotten together personally in the last few years because you seem to be friends?

Kal: We are friends yeah which is nice. I recently joked with him that it would have been a bummer if we didn’t get along in real life but we could have pretended. We presented an award at the Spike Scream Awards a couple of weeks ago and the stage was basically a plank in the middle of water and we had to walk back across the stage to get to where the holding room was and I said to him “If we didn’t like each other in real life, this is the point where America would find out because I have such an urge to do it”. I was so tempted to push him in the water. This is the point where that would be funny.

John: We’ve done three movies at this point and there’s really nobody who knows what it’s like to be Harold and Kumar except me and this guy so there’s a very special and unique bond that we share.

TeenHollywood: Was the first scene you shot together actually the first scene you shot in the movie?

Kal: I think so because I started laughing when I saw him in his Harold costume. I love that Kumar is such a weirdo and I’m showing up in his clothes and we’re looking at each other for the first time on set and I think I burst out laughing.

John: Two giants of American cinema colliding.

Kal: God, don’t ever do that.

John: Two icons.

Kal: Hey, our first movie totally tanked!

TeenHollywood: It was cool that you poked fun at some of your other characters as actors. Was that in the script and were you cool with it?

John: It was in the script. That’s in keeping with the world of Harold and Kumar and the sensibility of all three movies and there have been a lot of things that have happened between the second and third movie primarily, Neil’s life has changed. He came out so since we were using his real name in the movies, it seemed like an opportunity to address it.

Kal: It is in the vein of all three movies. I’m very proud of the serious stuff I did in Washington and he (John) is a bad-ass in a huge Star Trek movie and we take those things seriously but we don’t take the Harold and Kumar movies too seriously so it’s always fun.

John: We missed an opportunity. We were thinking of doing it one more time with RZA who is in Woo Tang Clan. We talked about it on set about whether Kumar should look at him and go…”nah” [it’s not him] but it slowed things down because that scene needed to be accelerated.

TeenHollywood: Kal, can you talk about observing life and putting it into the franchise? Will there be things from your work in the White House that you can put in a Harold and Kumar format?

Kal: I don’t think so. I think, what I love about both worlds is that they are so separate and I love being creative and frivolous with movies like this…

John: This is the most important thing in the world. This is like feeding people. These movies are like food to the starving. This is like manna. We are like divine. I’m sorry.[laughter].

Kal: Your humility is astounding. I can’t even respond to that.  I love public service. I love the seriousness and cerebral element of living in Washington and I love the creativity of a profession like this. To me they’re totally separate. To me, the only thing that is even remotely similar is it gets us kind of emotional is when we get tweets or little notes from the troops overseas and get the chance to do a couple of USO tours the last few years. It’s awesome to hear from these 18 and 19-year-old teens who tell you that comedy keeps them going a bit when they’re out there. You showed Star Trek also in Bahrain, right?

John: Yeah. It’s crazy. You’re looking at these soldiers who are so young that you are overwhelmed by their youth but it’s another thing when they’ve seen your work and it’s something to distract them; something to make them chuckle for a few minutes. There’s no greater honor than to be a part of distracting them from the serious nature of their work.

TeenHollywood: The franchise has become sort of what stoners Cheech and Chong was to a new generation. How do you feel about that comparison?

Kal: I was very flattered to hear that. (To John), this is where you’re going to be very humble again, I’m sure we don’t think of ourselves as being iconic in that respect.

TeenHollywood: You definitely are.

Kal: That’s a compliment then. I don’t even view these as exclusively stoner movies. I think compared to things like Cheech and Chong and Pineapple Express, Harold and Kumar aren’t high for very much of their movies and when they are high only bad things happen to them. So, that’s very different.

John: It was surprising to us that stoners responded to the movie as strongly as they did because we always felt there wasn’t all that much pot smoking and it didn’t seem all that fun. Whenever we’re compared to a duo that’s lasted like Cheech and Chong, that’s very high praise because we work on that. We consider our primary work on the movies to be believable as friends.

TeenHollywood: Did you enjoy the Latino comedy in this movie?

John: That was fun. Danny Trejo, he’s scary.

TeenHollywood: Did you think of doing any Machete jokes?

John: There was one floating around but you didn’t need it because we had his face.

TeenHollywood: How do you feel about the different cultures and races represented in this movie?

John: Making fun of culture and race and using that to poke fun has been what we do since the first one so it was great to finally get to play the in-law stuff because it was a way to make Asian-Latino jokes about discomfort. We tried and I hope that the Spanish-speaking audience particularly enjoys that section because there were a few Spanish-specific jokes.

TeenHollywood: What was the hardest part of doing this film?

John: Shooting winter in summer maybe?

Kal: I think it was not really taking the time to figure out what happened in the six years between the two movies because the first and second movies take place within a minute of each other and Kumar always has a positive outlook on life. He’s a bit of a slacker but, in this movie, he starts out really depressed, frankly. It took a lot of conversations.

I sat down with the writers for at least five sessions trying to figure out and craft the entire six years of his life to justify why. As John says, everything has to be believable to us in terms of the friendship so figuring out what it was with his relationship with Vanessa, did he ever finish med school? It seems like he did. How much weed does he smoke that he’s grown a beard and hasn’t left his apartment in four weeks? That kind of stuff was a very welcomed challenge. I enjoyed it very much crafting all that.

TeenHollywood: Would you ever like to work together playing totally different characters? Kal, I know you are doing that with Neil Patrick on “How I Met Your Mother”.

Kal: I think it would be fun. It’s okay (laughs).

TeenHollywood: Can you see yourself playing these characters for a long time.  Cheech and Chong continued well into their 50’s or 60’s.

John: Yeah. I think it would be fun actually. There is a very ingenious set-up. They called the first movie Harold and Kumar go to White Castle and I think it they hadn’t tapped into all those old buddy pictures and all the road pictures with those titles, nobody would have wanted a sequel. There’s kind of a trick to that title. It also is real in the sense that they’ve set up these characters and everything is kind of possible. I think it’s plausible to have them in their 50’s and 60’s and have grandkids and still be hittin’ the bong and getting into ridiculous adventures.

Kal: I’d be up for it. I love playing the character. As crazy as he is, Kumar is infinitely cooler than I will ever be in real life.

John: He is. He really is.

Kal: If I can go back to play him, it’s fun.

TeenHollywood: Are you concerned with backlash from the cocaine jokes with the baby?

Kal: You worked with the baby most closely and you pointed out that she was…

John: A degenerate, yeah. I hope there isn’t a backlash because I think that the attitudes of the central characters have always been very well-intentioned. I feel like, in an odd way, that the reason the movies work is that they’re so sweet and the humor, as raunchy and filthy as it is, it’s also sweet in a strange way so I hope there isn’t a backlash but that’s part and parcel of getting into that transgressive zone where humor works the best. If we stay safe, nobody will like the movie so there is a risk.

Kal: A lot of movies come close to a line or cross a line and I think what the writers of these movies frankly do is just get rid of the line altogether. They’ve created a world where anything is acceptable so, in this movie, Santa Claus, everybody assumes is real and exists to the extent that Harold can shoot him in the face and I can save his life. So, once you go there, I think that everything else is possible and believable.

What I also love is that, in the first movie, you saw society’s reaction to two guys like Harold and Kumar with the race and ethnicity subplot but then, in the second one, you realize that they get lost in inner city Newark or Camden and you see that Harold and Kumar have their own prejudices and stereotypes against other folks. Same thing in this one.

When I first read on the page, Kumar’s dream fantasy sequence with the church and he’s gonna punch out a member of the clergy, what are we doing here? But you realize that that is his fantasy sequence on how he’s gonna get the tree for his buddy. These characters are just as flawed as everybody else and that’s one way of looking at it, with humor so we certainly hope that nobody takes it seriously enough (to start a backlash).

John: It’s the fantasy of a very immature character.

TeenHollywood: You guys spend a lot of time tied up together in the film. How long were you tied up together?

John: Probably two days, wouldn’t you say?

Kal: It was an eternity. A lot of breath mints. You were actually up there a little longer and I got to leave. You were actually stuck there.

John: I’ve had worse. I’ve been in smaller spaces for longer. They did the best they could. They had a mock rope they connected with Velcro on the end so it was easier to get us in and out of it but sometimes we had to stay in there just for convenience sake. I guess if we bugged each other, that would have been the time to find out who had halitosis.