- I assume, as a doctor, I assume...
How often do you watch medical shows?
- Do you know how mad I am at House?
Do you know how I'm mad at you, at your scenes?
- Why?
Usually, nurses are mad at us.
- You shocked a patient and you lit them on fire.
- You crazy?
You can't use those.
We're in a hyperbaric- - Clear.
(paddles buzzing)
It was really fun.
- [Dr. Mike] How often do you think that?
- It was very fun.
Oh, no, I'm not saying it happens all the time.
The letters we got and I never saw them,
in fairness, this was just what I'd heard
from the producing team.
The nurses were furious at House, because all-
- [Dr. Mike] They're written off the show, basically.
- Well, yeah, all the procedures that we do are things
that nurses do in real life.
And so, understandably,
they would send very, very, very nasty letters.
- Well, the way that my channel had its moment
of popularity, 'cause initially,
for the first year we struggled in gaining an audience.
- [Kal] Yeah.
- Was doing medical drama reviews.
- Oh, no way! - So I would watch
with my audience, Grey's Anatomy, House.
- Awesome, I didn't know that. - Good Doctor,
and do critiques.
- [Kal] Yeah.
- So essentially, I would do the same consulting job
that you did for Designated Survivor, but for free.
- Right, right, yeah.
Well, for free, except you get your, yeah...
- Yes, so you get rewarded.
But I'm curious, does it pay well?
- What? - Being a consultant on it.
- Being a consultant?
It wasn't divorced from the overall-
- Acting? - Acting thing enough to-
- [Dr. Mike] Oh, okay.
- Actually, that's not true.
If it was divorced from that, does it pay well?
You couldn't pay your rent from it.
- [Dr. Mike] Oh, okay.
- But I assume if you're a full-time consultant,
you're not just working on one show, right?
Or if you are, then you're...
A lot of times, the consultants are also writers.
So on House, for example, a guy named David Foster,
Dr. Foster was, I think he was practicing at Harvard
and on the screenwriting team at the same time.
- Got it.
- And so, he was the one who put the glossaries
in the back of each script
about what the procedures all mean,
and we'd all go to YouTube and watch the real ones
and all that.
So a lot of times, there's overlap
that way where you're not just being paid as a consultant,
you're being paid as a writer as well.
In which case obviously, yes.
That's a a nice-
- I gotta figure that out.
I gotta figure out how to get into those.
'Cause I already do it.
- Do you have an agent? - Yeah.
- [Kal] So your agent should be able-
- Okay, so. - To help you with that.
- I gotta step up the...
'Cause I've tried my hand at acting,
and when I say, "tried my hand at acting,"
I read for an extra on Blacklist or something.
- Okay, all right, yeah.
- It was the most embarrassing, terrible thing
that any human...
I felt like I was giving a speech as myself,
not the evil FBI agent I was trying out to be, so.
I quickly knew that my talents
and acting were left behind in my drama club days
in fifth grade, sixth grade.
So, that's not for me.
But, consulting is pretty cool.
What was it like working on House?
Did you have to study vocabulary
and understand how to pronounce words?
- So I was not a consultant on House but-
- [Dr. Mike] I mean, not a consultant, an actor on House.
- I loved it, I mean the...
Okay, you mentioned Harold and Kumar
when we first started our conversation.
I wanna say that,
that was the first med student/doctor that I played.
And, for fans of the movie,
which it sounds like you are,
this is a very ridiculous story that I'm very proud of.
But, after I got the part
before we left to go shoot it,
I was living in Los Angeles
at the time and we were shooting the film in Toronto.
And before I left,
I realized there's a whole scene where I perform surgery
on a gunshot victim.
And I know exactly what I'm doing, I'm supposed to.
I mean, that character, he knows, yeah.
Kumar knows exactly what he's doing, right?
And so, I need to learn how to perform surgery
on a gunshot victim.
Because when you're shooting a comedy
usually, it's very quick.
I assume we'd have a consultant for the day
but who knows how much that person knows for real?
So aside from all the YouTube, online research I could find,
I spent two days
at the UCLA Medschool library researching,
reading articles like, very dense articles
about gunshot surgery and basic things that I'm sure you
and really, any gun owner even knows.
It's like, "Oh, when a bullet enters
it sears a certain amount of muscle
because of the heat," and just all of the shit
that a doctor would know that I would have no idea.
And it helped a lot
when we shot this completely ridiculous scene
with Ryan Reynolds where I'm just taking bullets out
of a patient and looking for marijuana, like it's-
- But is that because you're comfortable
in that scene, imagining yourself as that person?
It's like a method acting type thing?
- I don't think it's method acting.
In fact, I'm more of a...
There's a technique of acting called Meisner.
But if you haven't researched the thing
that you're doing, like in that scene, what motivates
that scene in that character
is not the surgery he's performing.
It's the search of marijuana, right?
But he's doing it second nature.
So I kinda had to know what I was doing.
Yeah, you can edit around it.
But physically, what are your hands doing
when you're concentrating on something else?
That's how good that character is at what he was doing.
I had to be at least familiar enough to believably live
in that moment of being a person
who knew what they were doing.
House was obviously different, it's a drama.
But my view of a lot of that was wanting
to know what the procedures were,
meeting with people.
You know, I half jokingly say like,
"I feel like I could still perform a spinal tap
if I had to."
- Really?
- Just 'cause-
- Do you think- - Go ahead.
- This is a weird question.
Do you think you prepared more
for being a doctor on Harold and Kumar or on House?
- Well, House was longer.
Kumar was really just the two scenes, the opening monologue
that you mentioned where I had to learn about-
- [Dr. Mike] Pancreatitis.
- Pancreatitis, which I've clearly forgotten.
And then the gunshot thing, which I very well remember.
House was all the different things,
and it was to your point, like all
of those cases would never end up
at a single hospital, obviously.
That's the fiction of it.
But then when you get into it,
I loved physics, biology, not so much chemistry
but in college even, high school for sure.
But I was never good at it.
I was never good at the sciences
in large part,
'cause I'm not a good multiple choice test-taker.
I'm great at being able
to explain something, either written or verbal.
And so, those early science classes, it's a lot
of rote memorization.
It's a lot of like, "You can't connect the dots
until you're in the advanced stage."
So doing a show like this, I didn't have
to go through that early stage of stuff.
I got to dive right into, I can understand these procedures.
I have, you know, these world class Harvard trained doctors
in the writer's room who are more than happy
to talk my ear off on the actual procedure,
excuse me, the actual procedure and how it happens.
And I was loving it, man! - That's awesome.
- It was the best, yeah.
- How do you balance that thing you mentioned earlier
where you like taking on challenges
and acting outside of your comfort zone
with this push in Hollywood,
I guess it's also a push
for diversity of not having straight actors play gay roles,
or a person without a disability
playing a person with disability,
what's your take on that?
- Yeah, look, I mean, on the gay question
for that I was joking, I mean, it wasn't even joking.
I was half joking with a friend of mine
on text a couple weeks ago, he's also gay and was asking
for my opinion on something, on some casting thing
that came out.
And I was like, "Bro, I'm Brown, I don't know.
I'm still dealing with the Brown shit.
What a luxury to have to worry
about the gay aspect of it too!
I don't know, man.
Ask me in another 30 years
when all the gays have decided
to be less racist in Hollywood, then maybe."
- That's funny, okay, so you're balancing it?
- Which is not to minimize the question, of course,
it's a valid question.
I think it kinda depends on the case, you know?
It's tough to I think, have that broad conversation.
To me, that conversation also often comes up
in the context of...
You know, there are a lot of older school comedians
or comedy directors even, who feel limited by the world
that we live in today.
They feel like, and I get this question a lot, you know.
Sometimes it's in the form of,
"Do you think you could ever make
Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle today
in the same way you made it?"
I'm like, "Well, no, of course not."
"Doesn't that suck?"
I'm like, "No, isn't that awesome?
Isn't that awesome that as a comedy guy,
as a content creator, I get to adapt
to changing sentiments of what's funny.
So if I'm doing my job and if I'm good at my job
I should be able to make a comedy today that also appeals
to a large group of people."
So on the contrary, I don't feel like my hands are tied
or as a man, I shouldn't make certain jokes
that we were, quote, unquote, "allowed to make in the past."
I think that's missing the point.
The point is audience sentiments have changed
and what a wonderful opportunity to continue
to push the envelope of what's funny and acceptable.
I think that's great.
- [Dr. Mike] You view it as growth?
- Totally view it as growth. - As opposed to a challenge?
- [Dr. Mike] Okay.
- It can be a challenge sometimes if you're,
I mean, especially if you're a man, the types
of, the structure of a lot of...
You know, look at the late '90s, early 2000s teen comedies,
a lot of 'em are based on a particular story arc, you know.
And that was what worked for that time period
but it doesn't work today.
And I think that's a really welcome, awesome challenge
that you can make things
that are funny in a different and new way.
- That's such a great mindset
because that applies not just in this case,
but also, for my patients who are struggling
with a cancer diagnosis
and show post-traumatic growth
where they're like, "Yeah, this is a challenge.
But I'm gonna overcome it.
I'm gonna get better from it
and view it in a positive light."
So it's awesome that you see it in that way and-
- Thank you.
- I hope everyone starts to see it in that way too.
- I hope so, yeah.
I know the immediate reaction is
to maybe feel a little aggrieved, right,
about something that's also the world we live in.
Everyone feels that way about something or other.
But, no, my view of that is
on the the growth piece of it, for sure.
- Was it difficult for you?
I mean, there's a lot
of gay jokes in Harold and Kumar.
- Yeah.
- How did you feel as a gay man, making the jokes?
Were you like, "This is funny, not funny, timewise funny,"
probably a hard question to answer?
- No, I honestly don't remember how I felt
at the time to be perfectly honest with you.
- Really, you were just like,
"It's a script, I'm reading it"?
- Yeah, kind of, I mean the-
- 'Cause you battled with Van Wilder's role being Taj
and you called...
- Yeah, the difference there was...
So the role of Taj was,
when it first started out,
I mean, the agent called,
the character is literally named Taj Mahal, okay?
We don't have to sugarcoat it.
He is named Taj Mahal.
The piece of it
that I thought was really interesting was unlike some
of the other things that I described where an accent is used
to mask bad writing,
and those characters never advanced the plot of the story.
In the case of Van Wilder,
though that character was obviously deeply problematic,
he also advances the plot of the story.
If you take that character out,
the plot doesn't advance,
the character of Van Wilder doesn't get
from point A to point B through the arc of the story.
It was a whole more complex
than we, you know, I described
in the audiobook, obviously,
all of the nuance including the final round audition
where I thought...
I knew it was between me and another guy
and I didn't know who the other guy was.
And I walk into the waiting room
and it's a white dude and brownface.
And I was not expecting that.
So I was like, "Oh, shit, okay."
Now my beef is rarely with another actor.
I understand the desperation of wanting a job,
but I was super intrigued.
I'm like, "Where did this dude put his makeup on?
Who told him to do it?"
You know, all of that.
But the other thing in my head was,
"This guy's not allowed to have this job.
I'm gonna get this job.
I'm gonna put it on my resume.
I get the credit.
He can play Braden from Idaho, 10 times over
and I'm not allowed.
I'm not allowed to be on Seinfeld.
I'm not allowed to be on Friends, he is.
So I'm taking this part, I'm getting it."
And I was very competitive
and ended up playing the part.
I think in the case of Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle,
I was so floored at the fact
that this was a movie featuring two Asian American men
who were leads in a comedy
that, I probably just had blinders on
for any of that other stuff.
With a 2022 lens, you know,
a lot of folks have I think rightfully, brought up some
of the misogyny in that film.
That is the type of movie that it was.
It's not something I even recognized at the time, probably.
Because I was so compartmentalized into my experience,
which was dealing with race or ethnicity,
that when I saw that script,
I'm like, "Funniest script I've ever read."
And I think both of those things are great examples
of if you were to make a movie like that today,
and by the way, I hope we get to do a fourth movie.
And the jokes would be elevated, right?
I don't think they would be any less funny.
I just think they'd be more elevated.