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Rob Corddry for Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay
By Erin Broadley
Apr 28, 2008
Last time we met Harold and Kumar, they journeyed across the state of New Jersey in search of the ultimate White Castle burger to satisfy a case of the munchies. Over the course of one, extremely long night, the pair triumphed over adversity, got their burgers and emerged America’s coolest bong-ripping duo since Cheech and Chong. Now Harold and Kumar are back with a new adventure, except this time the stakes are higher as they hop a fight to Amsterdam -- the weed capital of the world -- and find themselves imprisoned as suspected terrorists after trying to sneak a smokeless bong on board.
Alongside usual suspects John Cho (Harold), Kal Penn (Kumar) and a rowdy Neil Patrick Harris (as himself), Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay introduces us to the villainous Ron Fox -- played by Rob Corddry -- a racist, overzealous homeland security agent who makes it his mission to keep our unsung heroes behind bars.
As a senior correspondent for "The Daily Show" and in films like The Ten and Semi-Pro, Rob Corddry stole every scene and the same can be said for his role in this Harold & Kumar sequel. SuicideGirls caught up with Corddry at his home in Los Angeles to chat about playing the villain, busting shoplifters and the finer things in prison like toilet-meth.
Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is playing now in a theater near you.
Erin Broadley: You’re home waiting on a house inspection, huh? What do you have, termites?
Rob Corddry: [Laughs] You are literally the third person to ask that in the last hour and a half. [Laughs] Seriously, I didn’t even think termites were real. They’re just in cartoons right? They’re like Bugs Bunny.
EB:
Well how have things been going with Harold & Kumar?
RC:
Pretty good. It’s, dare I say, better than the first one.
EB:
It looks a little darker. I like how you get to play a villain in this one.
RC:
Totally. The movie is dark in the sense that, whereas the first movie had absolutely no stakes whatsoever -- it was about a bunch of stoned guys that wanted to eat hamburgers -- this movie has nothing but high stakes; they’re literally running for their lives.
EB:
How was it playing a villain? Did you enjoy it?
RC:
Yeah! I loved it. [Ron Fox] is literally the most racist character to be put on screen, save from maybe the Mississippi Burning guys.
EB:
Did you go all method-actor, Daniel Day Lewis-style, or study anybody in particular to play a villain?
RC:
I’m not kidding you, yes.
EB:
[Laughs]
RC:
I am that psychotic. I actually called the Merchant Marine Academy because I figured that would be my character’s trajectory. He’s sort of like George Bush in that he was in the National Guard in Texas but he never really flew. I thought, well, this guy had to have had military background, what’s the lamest military there is? Probably the Merchant Marines. Because they’re not really military but they fancy themselves so. I actually called the Merchant Marines like, “What do people end up doing out of [graduating]?”
EB:
It sounds like a dance troupe or something.
RC:
[Laughs] Doesn’t it? Ladies and gentlemen… the Merchant Marines!
EB:
Or it’s like an a cappella group… A barbershop quartet.
RC:
Yeah. [Laughs] Oh God.
EB:
What do they do?
RC:
Basically, they are like glorified shippers. They’re like the Navy without the guns. They wear uniforms. It’s the lamest thing in the world.
EB:
So that was your inspiration, like guys with a lot of pent up, unfulfilled aspirations who work security in gated communities and never become real cops.
RC:
Absolutely. That’s so funny you say that because I was an undercover security guard in college at the school store. I actually have experience. It filled me with such a false lame sense of power and I actually used that specifically for this role. I believe this character, Ron Fox, is the Vice Deputy Co-Chief of Homeland Security. Like, a perfect storm happens so that [Michael] Chertoff is off ice fishing somewhere and I get to step in.
EB:
Right, the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.
RC:
Exactly. I’m like the lame guy at the police station that gets the call and doesn’t tell anybody else because he wants it.
EB:
Did you go after stoners as an undercover security guard?
RC:
God no. I went after shoplifters. I was stoned most of the time. [Laughs] I busted this one guy once for probably stealing soap… people would steal the lamest things… his hands were shaking and I was all cool and I said, “Your hands are shaking, you must be pretty scared.” And he went, “I have Parkinson’s.”
EB:
Oh no…
RC:
[Laughs] I was like, “I am just a bad person.”
EB:
I saw an early trailer for this film where you were billed as the “powerful white man.”
RC:
[Laughs] Really? I love it. I’m actually going to put that on my headshot, “Rob Corddry: SAG, powerful white man.”
EB:
Were you a fan of the first film?
RC:
I loved it, yeah. I watched it at home on DVD like everybody did -- high, but high on Vicodin. I can’t smoke weed anymore.
EB:
So what exactly is a cock-meat sandwich?
RC:
I believe it’s literally a cock-meat sandwich without the bread. So it’s probably not a sandwich, more so just cock-meat. I have nothing to do with it. The guards at Guantanamo Bay, part of their punishment, part of their regiment of torture is to administer cock-meat sandwiches.
EB:
Any fun torture techniques you get to use on Harold and Kumar while you’re playing boss?
RC:
Oh, absolutely. I break a lot of things in this movie. My character fancies himself a little bit smarter than just your average torturer. So, rather than torture someone, say if he’s interrogating a black guy, he’ll poor out a can of grape soda and will keep going until the guy talks. He’ll say, “Yeah, yeah. That’s real…”
EB:
It’s so tense and painful, while being funny.
RC:
Yeah. There’s a lot of that.
EB:
How much did you get to bring to the table on your own, writing wise? Did the directors let you run with anything?
RC:
Oh, absolutely. The writers were also the directors and they were just really cool guys and let me get away with everything, basically. I even argued against one of my improvisations being in the film.
EB:
Which one?
RC:
I come in and I see [Harold and Kumar] and I say, “What’s the matter with that guys eyes? Is he retarded?” And they’re like, “He’s of Korean descent.” And then I say, “Oh, North Korea and al Qaeda working together.” But then I call John Cho “Hello Kitty.” That was my improvisation when I called John Cho “Hello Kitty”, but it really doesn’t make sense. If I knew that “Hello Kitty” would be an inappropriate and derogatory thing to call an Asian, then I would have known he was Asian and not retarded by the way his eyes looked. I actually said to the directors, “Guys this does not make logical sense,” and they were like, “Shut the fuck up; it’s going in the movie.”
EB:
How was it calling a real life friend of yours “Hello Kitty”? Did you guys bust up during that scene?
RC:
[Laughs] John Cho is not an easy man to crack up. And neither is Kal Penn. Eddie Kaye Thomas, on the other hand, was a sport to crack up. Like, it’s not even hard. It’s not even fun. It’s just too easy. He loves to laugh, way too easy.
EB:
Any favorite scenes with Neil Patrick Harris?
RC:
Yeah. Turns out my character is a big NPH fan. A big NPH fan. He basically lets Harold and Kumar get away because he’s so preoccupied with his love for Neil Patrick Harris. Come to find out that my character went in to Homeland Security because of, as he says, “Two words: Starship-Fucking-Troopers.”
EB:
[Laughs]
RC:
So that’s why I became a homeland security agent: Starship-Fucking-Troopers.
EB:
The tragedy is that it probably is the reason for some people.
RC:
[Laughs] I know, right? And you know what, I hope so. I hope that’s the case. Those are the guys I want on the front lines.
EB:
You and your brother did an interview together where you both talked about growing up in Massachusetts, and how even if you’re not funny, you’re sarcastic, and so, to other people, you come off as an asshole all the time.
RC:
Yep. One of my best friends is from Northern California -- hippie parents, smokes weed with his dad all the time, he’s that guy -- he’s one of my best friends, the godfather to my daughter, and within the first year I met him we were in a sketch group and he said to me, “Hey man, you’re really mean.” And I was like, “Fuck you.” [Laughs] Then I realized, “Wow. You know what? I guess I am.” Sarcasm is probably the lowest art form. You know what I mean? It’s the lowest rung on the comedy ladder. I think “The Daily Show” works so well because its form of humor is irony, of course, and satire. Irony is a part of satire. But most of the right wing “comedy guys” don’t get irony. They don’t do irony; they only do sarcasm.
EB:
Well, there has to be that little wink of the eye or else…
RC:
Yeah, [mean] is not how I want to be perceived. And I don’t mean perceived as far as the public goes, but just with my friends. I try and try but it’s a hard muscle to get rid of because it’s so strong. I try and think a little bit before and hopefully a smarter joke will present itself, but if it doesn’t then I’ll just tell someone to fuck off. The good thing about “The Daily Show” too is that we played guys who didn’t really get sarcasm or irony. Like, we weren’t smart enough to understand sarcasm or irony and therefore just kind of bungled all of it, you know?
EB:
[Laughs] Right. Well, how would you escape from prison if you had to? What lovely schemes would you come up with and do you think you’d be successful?
RC:
Um, my God, yeah I think I would. The way I’d escape from prison is with drugs; I would just escape from reality. That’s what I’d do. I’d really get into heroin or toilet-meth… just take a lot of whatever is around and kill myself with it.
EB:
Drano?
RC:
Yeah. The high you get from Drano right before you die is apparently really amazing and really clean. Very clean buzz. But then you die.
EB:
Have you ever been arrested?
RC:
Yes. I believe the charge was lowered from drunk and disorderly to just disorderly person.
EB:
So it wasn’t any federal offense like bringing a smokeless bong onto an airplane?
RC:
Nope. It was taking off my clothes and sitting down in the middle of the street.
EB:
Nice.
RC:
Yeah. Me and my friend Dave were arrested and it took like eight cops.
EB:
Really?
RC:
Well, it didn’t take eight cops, we didn’t resist or anything, but eight cops were there for two half-nude guys in the middle of the street…
EB:
Did you have to sit in jail for a while?
RC:
I did! I actually sat in jail … my theater friends came to bail me out and I said, “No.” I wanted to spend a whole night in jail… I have never been more hungover.
EB:
And nobody forced a cock-meat sandwich on you?
RC:
No, no.
EB:
When you go to jail, does word get out that you were the naked guy in the middle of the street?
RC:
It was little, liberal, New England college town so not a lot of people spend a lot of time in those jails.
EB:
So this whole movie was shot in Shreveport, Louisiana. I remember when you went down there…
RC:
Yeah. Horrible, horrible place. The best part about it was leaving. Every weekend I would just drive to Memphis or to Arkansas or just some other place that wasn’t Shreveport.
EB:
It’s a humid pit of back road or what?
RC:
Well, it is that. It’s a horrible place, in general. There’s not a lot to do there, not a lot of restaurants, hardly any movie theaters and not even a good mall. There’s really bad casinos that attract a really horrible element. I saw an old person a day being carried out in a stretcher. It’s a really shady place. The one thing I did do for fun, there was this huge three-story sporting goods store there and I would just go and look at knives and fishing poles and guns. I would just walk around and look at the guns, once a week. That place, it’s so easy to get a gun.
EB:
You got to shoot guns in this film.
RC:
I got to pretend to, yeah. I got to smash a woman in the face with the butt of my gun. It’s in the trailer but not in the movie… didn’t make the final cut. I got to go to this really high tech, state of the art, indoor shooting range a couple years ago for “The Daily Show” and it was amazing. It’s literally one of those places where you just walk slowly through doors with your gun right at your side and people pop up and you’ve got to shoot them.
EB:
Like the grandma or the terrorist?
RC:
Yeah. And they’re like, “Now why did you shoot that lady? You should not have shot that lady.” I was like, “Dude, I am going to shoot everything. I don’t care, I’m neutral, everyone dies.”
EB:
I read that you also had a security job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
RC:
Yes, I did. Whereas my security guard job filled me with a false sense of power, this stripped from me any illusions of power whatsoever [laughs]. It was the worst job. The worst. You’re basically on your feet for 12-14 hours a day, four days a week, telling school children not to touch the sculptures and art. It was awful. I probably have more experience in law enforcement as a security guard for the Met than my character the deputy director of homeland security does.
Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is in theaters now. For more information go to haroldandkumar.com. Next, catch Rob Corddry alongside Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz in What Happens in Vegas..., out May 9.
Last time we met Harold and Kumar, they journeyed across the state of New Jersey in search of the ultimate White Castle burger to satisfy a case of the munchies. Over the course of one, extremely long night, the pair triumphed over adversity, got their burgers and emerged America’s coolest bong-ripping duo since Cheech and Chong. Now Harold and Kumar are back with a new adventure, except this time the stakes are higher as they hop a fight to Amsterdam -- the weed capital of the world -- and find themselves imprisoned as suspected terrorists after trying to sneak a smokeless bong on board.
Alongside usual suspects John Cho (Harold), Kal Penn (Kumar) and a rowdy Neil Patrick Harris (as himself), Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay introduces us to the villainous Ron Fox -- played by Rob Corddry -- a racist, overzealous homeland security agent who makes it his mission to keep our unsung heroes behind bars.
As a senior correspondent for "The Daily Show" and in films like The Ten and Semi-Pro, Rob Corddry stole every scene and the same can be said for his role in this Harold & Kumar sequel. SuicideGirls caught up with Corddry at his home in Los Angeles to chat about playing the villain, busting shoplifters and the finer things in prison like toilet-meth.
Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is playing now in a theater near you.
Erin Broadley: You’re home waiting on a house inspection, huh? What do you have, termites?
Rob Corddry: [Laughs] You are literally the third person to ask that in the last hour and a half. [Laughs] Seriously, I didn’t even think termites were real. They’re just in cartoons right? They’re like Bugs Bunny.
EB:
Well how have things been going with Harold & Kumar?
RC:
Pretty good. It’s, dare I say, better than the first one.
EB:
It looks a little darker. I like how you get to play a villain in this one.
RC:
Totally. The movie is dark in the sense that, whereas the first movie had absolutely no stakes whatsoever -- it was about a bunch of stoned guys that wanted to eat hamburgers -- this movie has nothing but high stakes; they’re literally running for their lives.
EB:
How was it playing a villain? Did you enjoy it?
RC:
Yeah! I loved it. [Ron Fox] is literally the most racist character to be put on screen, save from maybe the Mississippi Burning guys.
EB:
Did you go all method-actor, Daniel Day Lewis-style, or study anybody in particular to play a villain?
RC:
I’m not kidding you, yes.
EB:
[Laughs]
RC:
I am that psychotic. I actually called the Merchant Marine Academy because I figured that would be my character’s trajectory. He’s sort of like George Bush in that he was in the National Guard in Texas but he never really flew. I thought, well, this guy had to have had military background, what’s the lamest military there is? Probably the Merchant Marines. Because they’re not really military but they fancy themselves so. I actually called the Merchant Marines like, “What do people end up doing out of [graduating]?”
EB:
It sounds like a dance troupe or something.
RC:
[Laughs] Doesn’t it? Ladies and gentlemen… the Merchant Marines!
EB:
Or it’s like an a cappella group… A barbershop quartet.
RC:
Yeah. [Laughs] Oh God.
EB:
What do they do?
RC:
Basically, they are like glorified shippers. They’re like the Navy without the guns. They wear uniforms. It’s the lamest thing in the world.
EB:
So that was your inspiration, like guys with a lot of pent up, unfulfilled aspirations who work security in gated communities and never become real cops.
RC:
Absolutely. That’s so funny you say that because I was an undercover security guard in college at the school store. I actually have experience. It filled me with such a false lame sense of power and I actually used that specifically for this role. I believe this character, Ron Fox, is the Vice Deputy Co-Chief of Homeland Security. Like, a perfect storm happens so that [Michael] Chertoff is off ice fishing somewhere and I get to step in.
EB:
Right, the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.
RC:
Exactly. I’m like the lame guy at the police station that gets the call and doesn’t tell anybody else because he wants it.
EB:
Did you go after stoners as an undercover security guard?
RC:
God no. I went after shoplifters. I was stoned most of the time. [Laughs] I busted this one guy once for probably stealing soap… people would steal the lamest things… his hands were shaking and I was all cool and I said, “Your hands are shaking, you must be pretty scared.” And he went, “I have Parkinson’s.”
EB:
Oh no…
RC:
[Laughs] I was like, “I am just a bad person.”
EB:
I saw an early trailer for this film where you were billed as the “powerful white man.”
RC:
[Laughs] Really? I love it. I’m actually going to put that on my headshot, “Rob Corddry: SAG, powerful white man.”
EB:
Were you a fan of the first film?
RC:
I loved it, yeah. I watched it at home on DVD like everybody did -- high, but high on Vicodin. I can’t smoke weed anymore.
EB:
So what exactly is a cock-meat sandwich?
RC:
I believe it’s literally a cock-meat sandwich without the bread. So it’s probably not a sandwich, more so just cock-meat. I have nothing to do with it. The guards at Guantanamo Bay, part of their punishment, part of their regiment of torture is to administer cock-meat sandwiches.
EB:
Any fun torture techniques you get to use on Harold and Kumar while you’re playing boss?
RC:
Oh, absolutely. I break a lot of things in this movie. My character fancies himself a little bit smarter than just your average torturer. So, rather than torture someone, say if he’s interrogating a black guy, he’ll poor out a can of grape soda and will keep going until the guy talks. He’ll say, “Yeah, yeah. That’s real…”
EB:
It’s so tense and painful, while being funny.
RC:
Yeah. There’s a lot of that.
EB:
How much did you get to bring to the table on your own, writing wise? Did the directors let you run with anything?
RC:
Oh, absolutely. The writers were also the directors and they were just really cool guys and let me get away with everything, basically. I even argued against one of my improvisations being in the film.
EB:
Which one?
RC:
I come in and I see [Harold and Kumar] and I say, “What’s the matter with that guys eyes? Is he retarded?” And they’re like, “He’s of Korean descent.” And then I say, “Oh, North Korea and al Qaeda working together.” But then I call John Cho “Hello Kitty.” That was my improvisation when I called John Cho “Hello Kitty”, but it really doesn’t make sense. If I knew that “Hello Kitty” would be an inappropriate and derogatory thing to call an Asian, then I would have known he was Asian and not retarded by the way his eyes looked. I actually said to the directors, “Guys this does not make logical sense,” and they were like, “Shut the fuck up; it’s going in the movie.”
EB:
How was it calling a real life friend of yours “Hello Kitty”? Did you guys bust up during that scene?
RC:
[Laughs] John Cho is not an easy man to crack up. And neither is Kal Penn. Eddie Kaye Thomas, on the other hand, was a sport to crack up. Like, it’s not even hard. It’s not even fun. It’s just too easy. He loves to laugh, way too easy.
EB:
Any favorite scenes with Neil Patrick Harris?
RC:
Yeah. Turns out my character is a big NPH fan. A big NPH fan. He basically lets Harold and Kumar get away because he’s so preoccupied with his love for Neil Patrick Harris. Come to find out that my character went in to Homeland Security because of, as he says, “Two words: Starship-Fucking-Troopers.”
EB:
[Laughs]
RC:
So that’s why I became a homeland security agent: Starship-Fucking-Troopers.
EB:
The tragedy is that it probably is the reason for some people.
RC:
[Laughs] I know, right? And you know what, I hope so. I hope that’s the case. Those are the guys I want on the front lines.
EB:
You and your brother did an interview together where you both talked about growing up in Massachusetts, and how even if you’re not funny, you’re sarcastic, and so, to other people, you come off as an asshole all the time.
RC:
Yep. One of my best friends is from Northern California -- hippie parents, smokes weed with his dad all the time, he’s that guy -- he’s one of my best friends, the godfather to my daughter, and within the first year I met him we were in a sketch group and he said to me, “Hey man, you’re really mean.” And I was like, “Fuck you.” [Laughs] Then I realized, “Wow. You know what? I guess I am.” Sarcasm is probably the lowest art form. You know what I mean? It’s the lowest rung on the comedy ladder. I think “The Daily Show” works so well because its form of humor is irony, of course, and satire. Irony is a part of satire. But most of the right wing “comedy guys” don’t get irony. They don’t do irony; they only do sarcasm.
EB:
Well, there has to be that little wink of the eye or else…
RC:
Yeah, [mean] is not how I want to be perceived. And I don’t mean perceived as far as the public goes, but just with my friends. I try and try but it’s a hard muscle to get rid of because it’s so strong. I try and think a little bit before and hopefully a smarter joke will present itself, but if it doesn’t then I’ll just tell someone to fuck off. The good thing about “The Daily Show” too is that we played guys who didn’t really get sarcasm or irony. Like, we weren’t smart enough to understand sarcasm or irony and therefore just kind of bungled all of it, you know?
EB:
[Laughs] Right. Well, how would you escape from prison if you had to? What lovely schemes would you come up with and do you think you’d be successful?
RC:
Um, my God, yeah I think I would. The way I’d escape from prison is with drugs; I would just escape from reality. That’s what I’d do. I’d really get into heroin or toilet-meth… just take a lot of whatever is around and kill myself with it.
EB:
Drano?
RC:
Yeah. The high you get from Drano right before you die is apparently really amazing and really clean. Very clean buzz. But then you die.
EB:
Have you ever been arrested?
RC:
Yes. I believe the charge was lowered from drunk and disorderly to just disorderly person.
EB:
So it wasn’t any federal offense like bringing a smokeless bong onto an airplane?
RC:
Nope. It was taking off my clothes and sitting down in the middle of the street.
EB:
Nice.
RC:
Yeah. Me and my friend Dave were arrested and it took like eight cops.
EB:
Really?
RC:
Well, it didn’t take eight cops, we didn’t resist or anything, but eight cops were there for two half-nude guys in the middle of the street…
EB:
Did you have to sit in jail for a while?
RC:
I did! I actually sat in jail … my theater friends came to bail me out and I said, “No.” I wanted to spend a whole night in jail… I have never been more hungover.
EB:
And nobody forced a cock-meat sandwich on you?
RC:
No, no.
EB:
When you go to jail, does word get out that you were the naked guy in the middle of the street?
RC:
It was little, liberal, New England college town so not a lot of people spend a lot of time in those jails.
EB:
So this whole movie was shot in Shreveport, Louisiana. I remember when you went down there…
RC:
Yeah. Horrible, horrible place. The best part about it was leaving. Every weekend I would just drive to Memphis or to Arkansas or just some other place that wasn’t Shreveport.
EB:
It’s a humid pit of back road or what?
RC:
Well, it is that. It’s a horrible place, in general. There’s not a lot to do there, not a lot of restaurants, hardly any movie theaters and not even a good mall. There’s really bad casinos that attract a really horrible element. I saw an old person a day being carried out in a stretcher. It’s a really shady place. The one thing I did do for fun, there was this huge three-story sporting goods store there and I would just go and look at knives and fishing poles and guns. I would just walk around and look at the guns, once a week. That place, it’s so easy to get a gun.
EB:
You got to shoot guns in this film.
RC:
I got to pretend to, yeah. I got to smash a woman in the face with the butt of my gun. It’s in the trailer but not in the movie… didn’t make the final cut. I got to go to this really high tech, state of the art, indoor shooting range a couple years ago for “The Daily Show” and it was amazing. It’s literally one of those places where you just walk slowly through doors with your gun right at your side and people pop up and you’ve got to shoot them.
EB:
Like the grandma or the terrorist?
RC:
Yeah. And they’re like, “Now why did you shoot that lady? You should not have shot that lady.” I was like, “Dude, I am going to shoot everything. I don’t care, I’m neutral, everyone dies.”
EB:
I read that you also had a security job at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
RC:
Yes, I did. Whereas my security guard job filled me with a false sense of power, this stripped from me any illusions of power whatsoever [laughs]. It was the worst job. The worst. You’re basically on your feet for 12-14 hours a day, four days a week, telling school children not to touch the sculptures and art. It was awful. I probably have more experience in law enforcement as a security guard for the Met than my character the deputy director of homeland security does.
Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is in theaters now. For more information go to haroldandkumar.com. Next, catch Rob Corddry alongside Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz in What Happens in Vegas..., out May 9.
Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay is in theaters now. For more information go to haroldandkumar.com. Next, catch Rob Corddry alongside Ashton Kutcher and Cameron Diaz in What Happens in Vegas..., out May 9.
