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Kal Penn will never forget seeing his “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor” co-star Abbie Cornish for the first time as Anna Nicole Smith.
“She really embodied Anna Nicole in a very striking way,” Penn tells me. “She was a completely
different person. I briefly met Anna Nicole a handful of times way back when I was starting my career, and she was on a reality show. I never really had any conversations of any note with her but it definitely brought me back to that time. Abbie is excellent. She’s phenomenal in this role.”
The movie, written and directed by Thane Economou, tells the story of Dr. Sandeep Kapoor (Penn), Smith’s doctor, who was charged with several felonies related to prescribing medications to the late model before her death in 2007. He was cleared of any wrongdoing and acquitted of all charges after a nine-week trial.
The movie is based on Kapoor’s memoir of the same name.
Variety has the exclusive first look at the film. One still, above, shows Smith and Kapoor’s appearance at the West Hollywood Pride parade in 2005. At the time, Kapoor faced backlash for seemingly crossing a doctor-patient boundary by becoming too close with Smith.
Another photo, below, shows Kapoor and his lawyer, Ellyn Garofalo, played by Linda Hamilton, in a courthouse hallway.
Penn says Cornish stayed clear of presenting Smith as a caricature. “I didn’t feel like it was an impersonation,” he says. “I felt like she brought all of the heart and the vulnerability and the complexity of Anne Nicole Smith. What made my job easier also is anytime you’re in scenes like that, and you know my character is sort of responding to the Anna character, and then Abby just walks in as Anna, my job is immediately easier.”
I can also exclusively reveal that “Trust Me, I’m a Doctor,” will be released in theaters by Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment on Oct. 16. Producers include Ryan Hawkins, Al Engemann, Rebecca Case and Geenah Krisht.
In 2017, Kapoor triggered a rash of headlines when he said during an interview for the Reelz Channel docuseries “Scandal Made Me Famous” that he didn’t believe Smith was an addict.
“I know there was a controversy,” Kapoor said at the time. “‘Is she an addict? Isn’t she an addict?’ In court, in the legal terms, she was proved to not be an addict. And what does that mean? Well, that means that she had legitimate pain issues. That’s what was discovered in the trial, that she had legitimate pain issues for which she received pain medication and treatment for. She was not an addict.”
Penn says it’s not for him to figure out if Kapoor contributed to Smith’s death. “Sandeep said, ‘I’ve been a big fan for a while, and I’m so glad that you’re playing me and will do justice to my story,’” Penn recalls. “I said, ‘I am very flattered by everything you said, but I need you to know that my job is not to weigh in on and do justice to any story — it’s to do justice to the character as written in the script.’ It was not a question of culpability, but it was a question of the dynamic within everything that he experienced.”
They did discuss Kapoor’s belief that Smith wasn’t an addict. “He walked me through the difference between somebody who may have a dependency on something and somebody who is addicted to something,” Penn says. “That’s not a concept that I was familiar with, especially for those of us who’ve lived in L.A. who know plenty of people have various prescriptions for things because they’re scared of things like getting on a highway or whatnot.”
The movie takes a look at Smith’s inner circle. “It definitely gave me pause when you sort of think about how many enablers there are along the way,” Penn says. “Obviously, she was not an actor by trade. She was a model and a personality, but still, when you see that somebody has a problem, your solution is just to keep it going?”
Penn says it reminded him of a time early in his career when he had to appear shirtless in a movie. He worked hard to slim down and build muscle for the scene. “I got a trainer, and I was doing two gallons of water a day, so I would have to go to the bathroom every 20 minutes,” Penn recalls. “I would go to the bathroom every time there was a lighting reset, and on the third day, the AD knocks on my trailer door, and he goes, ‘Hey, so listen, I know you don’t know anybody in town, but if you need anything, if you run out,’ and he starts tapping his nose.
“I was like, ‘What do you mean?’” He continues. “He goes, ‘You know what I’m saying. I know you go to your trailer every 20 minutes.’ He’s tapping his nose. It dawned on me that he’s offering me cocaine because he thinks that that’s why I’m leaving every 20 minutes to go back to my trailer. I was like, ‘Whoa, do you see the two-gallon water jugs that I bring everywhere with me? I’m trying to drop weight for this shirtless scene. You think I’m doing cocaine, so your solution is to offer me more?’ He says, ‘Look man, my job is to make sure we finish the day and finish the movie.’”
