Before comedian Ken Jeong cracked into pop cultural consciousness as Hollywood's newest cameo king, he didn't crave movie stardom. The raging Asian guy seen venting spleen and spouting invective in several of the last few years' high-grossing gross-out comedies wasn't even a professional joke-teller by trade.
Before a casting coup landed Jeong an enviable spot on the batting order for some of movie comedy's heaviest hitters -- Judd Apatow, Todd Phillips, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay among them -- Jeong's day job didn't involve making people laugh at all. Unless prescribing pain medication for, say, an angry patient with a herniated disc is your idea of funny.
"I practiced internal medicine at Kaiser in Woodland Hills," Jeong said over lunch near his home in Calabasas. "Comedy was a hobby. It was like my golf. I had another life."
But once Apatow gave him his breakthrough -- a supporting part as the mucho aggro OB-GYN doctor who bullies and upbraids Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl's characters through the final contractions of her pregnancy in 2007's rom-com hit "Knocked Up" -- casting agents started calling. And nearly a dozen movies later, they haven't stopped.
With short but indelible appearances in such raunchy crowd pleasers as "Pineapple Express," "Role Models" and "Step Brothers" to his credit, Jeong can currently be seen in one of this weekend's top-grossing movies, "The Hangover," which arrived in theaters on Friday. And later this year, the MD-turned-comic will appear in "Couples Retreat" with Vince Vaughn, the Will Ferrell used-car comedy "The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard" and the romantic comedy "All About Steve" with Sandra Bullock.
According to "Hangover" director Phillips, Jeong's defining characteristic is his "fearlessness" -- something put on prominent display in the bawdy R-rated comedy that follows friends (Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms) trying to piece together what happened during a Vegas bachelor party gone horribly awry. Portraying Mr. Chow, an Asian crime lord who has been inexplicably locked in the trunk of their vintage Mercedes, Jeong literally bursts on screen; naked, swearing a blue streak and clanging a tire-iron upside the leads' heads like Barry Bonds. The idea to do full frontal was Jeong's.
"He just comes in and crushes those little parts in films," Phillips said. "That's what you look for: a guy who can come in and just destroy it. He's crazy!"
