Actor Kal Penn has played a lot of roles in his time as an actor. He’s been a stoner, a doctor, a police detective and even a teenage terrorist. Well, now, he’s getting some odd attention for playing a character who looked like a terrorist but wasn’t.
Confused? That’s OK, this is an interestingly weird story. The tweet comes from the Russian Ambassador to the UK, Alexander Yakovenko. In trying to make his point about US involvement in Iraq, he (or, more likely, his people) used an image of Kal Penn from the movie Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. In the film, the pot smoking duo are accused of terrorism after trying to sneak a bong on an airplane.
Lucky for us, Kal Penn had a super chill reply once he saw Alexander Yakovenko’s tweet:
It’s no surprise that Kal Penn has a sense of humor. How can you act in a three-film (not including the two movie shorts) series about silly stoner behavior without having a pretty well defined sense of the absurd? Not long after Penn revealed that he thought the whole thing was funny, the Russian Embassy in the UK responded with a rather serious tweet to the star about how nobody has photos of actual terrorists laughing. (Bad idea.) So, Penn had this to say:
In case you’re not up to speed on your Rocky film series history, this is an image of Dolph Lundgren as Drago from Rocky IV. This Russian bastard killed Apollo Creed in the ring, you guys. And Rocky had to go kick his ass in Russia.
Now this just shows that even someone who’s dabbled in politics, as Kal Penn did when he served the Obama administration as an Associate Director in the Office of Public Engagement, is capable of laughing at themselves. Having the last funny word on this clearly ridiculous subject, even after the Russian embassy got all pissy about the motives behind using the picture, tells us exactly how much of a class act Penn is.
Really, without Kal Penn deflecting this idiocy with well-timed humor, this whole thing could have become some sort of racial incident that set off a Twitter war of words. Instead, it’s a lovely story that makes us laugh about different cultures not clashing over a non-issue. And I say, thank you Kal Penn. Thank you very much.
