Kal Penn admits he never followed the Anna Nicole Smith saga. Even so, he was sure he knew how it ended when the script for “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor” landed in his inbox.
“When I first got the script, I think what was crazy is I didn’t really know the Anna Nicole Smith story. I still don’t, to be honest,” Penn said in an exclusive interview with Where Is The Buzz.
“I saw an email with the script attached, and I thought, oh, right, I remember hearing about this. This is that doctor who’s in prison for murdering that lady, OK,” he said. “And then I start reading the script, and I was like, oh, that’s not what happened at all. Why do I think that’s what happened? For a case I didn’t even follow.”
Penn stars as Dr. Sandeep Kapoor, the Los Angeles physician who treated Smith and was swept into the legal fallout after her 2007 overdose death. The film, written and directed by Thane Economou, opens in theaters Friday. Abbie Cornish plays Smith, and Linda Hamilton plays Kapoor’s attorney, Ellyn Garofalo.
The movie is based on Kapoor’s 2017 memoir, “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor: My Life Before, During and After Anna Nicole Smith.”
Smith, a model and reality TV star, died in February 2007 at age 39 of combined drug intoxication in a hotel room in Hollywood, Florida. Kapoor, who had prescribed her medications, faced felony charges in a drug conspiracy case and was acquitted of all charges in 2010.
Penn said his own snap judgment about the case says a lot about how people take in news today.
“We all, especially 2026, we all think that we’re experts on something because we saw three tweets,” he said. “So I’m like, I know everything there is to know about this.”
The premise intrigued him, Penn said, though he was wary that the film was adapted from Kapoor’s own account.
“So that was intriguing to begin with, and then I was a little skeptical, because I was like, well, it’s a script based on a book that the real guy wrote, so what is this?” he said.
Then Penn spoke with Kapoor himself, whom he described as “very sweet.”
“He said, ‘I’m a really big fan. I’m so glad you’re playing this character, because I know you’ll do justice to my story,'” Penn said. “And I was like, hold on, buddy, that is not my job as the actor. My job is to do justice to this script that this other guy wrote.”
“And I was like, look, it’s based on your book, so I would assume that you’re OK with this story being told,” Penn recalled.
What ultimately drew him in, he said, was how exposed the script allows Kapoor to be.
“The way that Sandeep is depicted in the script is really vulnerable. I mean, he’s a deeply insecure person,” Penn said. “He makes a lot of really bad decisions, most of which are morally questionable.”
Some of those choices, he added, raise legal questions as well.
“But that’s what the real appeal was,” Penn said. “I don’t remember the last time that I’ve gotten to play somebody who was that deeply insecure, and to kind of explore what that’s like in a feature. So that was kind of the appeal for me.”
“I don’t think I really had a perception,” Penn said of Smith. He remembered watching her rise during the early years of reality television.
“That was the nascent days of reality TV, so there weren’t as many reality shows as there are today,” he said. “I just remember thinking, oh, that’s a colorful personality. I wonder how much of it is an act because there are cameras following her, or are there cameras following her because it’s not an act?”
“I know that’s an open question that our movie asks also,” he added.
Penn said he deliberately kept his focus on the doctor rather than the celebrity.
“Because I play Sandeep, the doctor, and because the arc of the character starts before he knew her, and then goes through, obviously, through her death, I didn’t want to overresearch the real Anna Nicole Smith. I wanted to kind of see it through Sandeep’s eyes,” he said. “I’m sure Thane … would have hours of opinions on all of this stuff, but for me, it didn’t really change, I would say.”
Asked what audiences might reconsider about celebrity stories they think they already know, Penn was careful not to stretch the film’s message too far.
“I don’t know that I would project this story any more broadly, other than, look, stuff like this keeps happening, I think, because of the culture that we’ve often created within entertainment,” he said.
He shared a story from earlier in his career to make the point.
“I remember there was a movie that I did back in the day, and I was training a lot for it, because I had to take my shirt off,” Penn said. “So I was chugging two gallons of water a day. So every time there was a lighting change on set, I would run to the bathroom and then come back.”
“The third or fourth day, the assistant director knocks on my trailer door and goes, ‘Hey man, just letting you know, if you run out, just let me know. I know a guy,'” he said. “And I was like, why is this guy tapping on his nose? What is he talking about? And then it dawns on me, he thinks I’m going to my trailer to do lines of coke.”
Penn said he set the assistant director straight.
“Buddy, first of all, you see the jug of water I drink. I’m just going to the bathroom throughout the day because I got to take my shirt off in three weeks,” he said. “Number two, you thought that I have a coke problem and your solution was to offer me more coke?”
The moment was absurd, Penn said, but it points to something serious.
“Obviously, that’s a ridiculous version of it, but there are people who have died because of this type of behavior, right?” he said. “And the AD was like, look, my job is to make sure we make our days. I was like, there has got to be a better solution than this.”
For Penn, though, the heart of the film lies elsewhere.
“I don’t know if that’s the story behind the story of what we’re telling,” he said. “To me, the story that I think is most interesting is the vulnerability of this doctor, what we think we see in the press versus what happens after headlines fade when there’s a massive court case, and the ins and outs of what that looks like. And then just the moral versus legal questions.”
Penn, who has played a doctor many times, said the role still taught him something new about medicine.
“I didn’t know that there was a difference between an addiction and a dependency, for instance,” he said. “So here’s somebody who may have had a dependency but not an addiction. Maybe she had an addiction that the doctor didn’t know about.”
“Those were really interesting things as the actor who got to play that guy, also,” Penn said.
