Kal Penn
American actor, author, and former White House staff member in the Barack Obama administration
Kalpen Suresh Modi (Gujarati: કલ્પેન સુરેશ મોદી; kəl-PAIN su-REYSH MOH-thee; born April 23, 1977), known professionally as Kal Penn, is an American actor, author, and former White House staff member in the Barack Obama administration.
As an actor he is known for his portrayals of Kumar Patel in the Harold & Kumar film series, Lawrence Kutner on the television program House, White House staffer Seth Wright on Designated Survivor, and Kevin Venkataraghavan, a psychologist and boyfriend to Robin in How I Met Your Mother. He is also recognized for his performance in the film The Namesake. Penn once taught at the University of Pennsylvania in the Cinema Studies Program as a visiting lecturer.
In April 2009, Penn joined the Obama administration as an associate director in the White House Office of Public Engagement as liaison for outreach to Asian Pacific Americans and arts communities. This necessitated that his TV character, Lawrence Kutner, be written out of House. Penn briefly left his post in June 2010 to film the third installment of the Harold & Kumar series, A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, returning to his White House job upon the film's completion. In July 2011, he again left the White House to accept a role in the television series How I Met Your Mother.
From 2016 to 2019, he played Seth Wright in the political drama Designated Survivor, where he also worked as a consultant on the show. He also hosted the game show Superhuman.
The public source identifies “Kal Penn” as american actor, author, and former White House staff member in the Barack Obama administration. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Penn, American and actor.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Kal Penn”, the useful work is to connect “american actor, author, and former White House staff member in the Barack Obama administration” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q220536. The first chronological checks are 1977, 2009, 2010 and 2011.
Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kal Penn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.