We read something, I think it was a Screen Actors Guild thing, that said that 40 percent of actors have screen names, and … [my friends] were just berating me with things like, “What about ‘Kal Pacino’?” And I was rejecting all of their awful suggestions, and thought, Everyone calls me Kal anyway. My first name is Kalpen, so it’s sort of how Joseph becomes Joe, that kind of thing. And it did increase auditions. To this day, I’ve never been completely sure whether it was [because it was] less ethnic sounding or just [because it was] monosyllabic and that was easier. I recently saw a profile on CBS Sunday Morning with Martin Sheen, and there was this throwaway line where he talked about changing his name from Estevez to Sheen; he was like, “It was a different time, at that point Estevez was considered too ethnic for some producers.” And I thought, Wow, every number of years, it’s something else.
—Kal Penn, on choosing a stage name. (Also in the interview: the star of the Harold and Kumar movies doesn’t smoke pot! Whaaaaat?)
OK: A good friend of mine, who is unemployed and overqualified for everything, recently discovered that by truncating her own last name to ‘Penn’ (short for ‘Pennacchia,’ which isn’t a difficult name at all) has, in her job search, gotten her a ton of follow-ups. It’s like, employers really do only want to hire the person with the simplest name.