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If John Cho is anything like the fussy, fretful character he plays in the new stoner comedy Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, he's not showing it.

Immaculately dressed in sleek black, with some sizable man-bling on his fingers, Cho is so relaxed he begins our interview by flipping through a local newspaper, apparently forgetting that he has only 13 minutes to plug his new film. Then again, Harold & Kumar 2 is a comedy about absent-minded herbalists.

A veteran of dozens of television and film roles, Cho came to prominence when 2004's Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle became an unexpected cult hit, making more money on DVD than it did in the theatres. Cho's believable interpretation of a Felix Ungar-like control freak (granted, a Felix Ungar with a penchant for B.C. salad) anchored the otherwise ridiculous film, giving it a touch of necessary plausibility. Since then, he has turned up on Grey's Anatomy, House (which now stars Kumar himself, Kal Penn), Kitchen Confidential and Ugly Betty, and has just finished playing Sulu in J.J. Abrams's much-anticipated Star Trek prequel.

A big part of the charm of the Harold & Kumar movies is the perfectly tuned dynamic between Cho and Penn, who simultaneously play with and against "buddy" comedy tropes. Cho, playing a success-obsessed good boy with one bad, but very enjoyable, habit, invests Harold & Kumar 2 with more depth and more tension than the actual writing often requires.

Subsequently, what could be a forgettable night out (see Dude, Where's My Car? for a soulless example of how stoner comedies can co horribly wrong) becomes, via the sweet and realistic relationship created by the leads, something more: a film about two young men trying to balance the ambitions and pressures common to first-generation immigrants (Harold is an entry-level banker, Kumar a medical student) against their natural, youthful desires for pot, girls, pranks and more pot.

[Cho reads a newspaper headline, eyebrows knotted.]

What are you reading?

The San Francisco protests. ... This is so interesting, um, you know, how China is dealing with their Olympic issues.

Badly?

Badly. But I think it may be an interesting and ultimately healthy process that they are really forced to engage with other countries, because their reputation is at stake. That's why they're putting on the Olympics - as a big show of how up-to-date they are - and if that claim is true, they're going to have to work through these issues. You know, they built a huge forest north of Beijing to improve the pollution problem, and I'm like, 'Well, good move!' Maybe it results in actual change. ... We'll see.

You're really tired of talking about your movie, aren't you?

Ha! No, no!

Well, let's talk politics. A lot of films have come out about the post-Sept. 11 reality in the United States, and the U.S. public is avoiding them. How odd that this goofy comedy might be the one everyone sees.

Fingers crossed! Yeah, it's odd. You think it's because it's too terrible a subject that our access point has to be laughter? But Fahrenheit 9/11 did well. Maybe people will absorb some of the politics in this film by osmosis, but I have to say the filmmakers are probably cheaper than that - they were using the Guantanamo Bay thing to make poop and booby jokes. But if that gets people to think about the politics, I'm all for it. And the political stuff makes the stakes so much higher that the laughs are a little bit more intense.

The film plays fast and loose with racial stereotypes. Every time you think the movie is headed one way with a stereotype, the script flips.

Yeah, it's such a tease. I don't know what that dynamic is, exactly. ... Maybe it's getting you to nod along for a second and then slapping you across the face with a glove and saying, 'You cad!' And maybe we enjoy that.

The scary thing about H&K 2's plot is its absurd believability. In a panicked situation, somebody could end up in Guantanamo Bay by mistake.

Yeah, yeah. Part of the inspiration for this film was that, during our press tour for the first movie, Kal was getting pulled aside a lot. One time, he had a white friend travelling with him, and Kal got pulled aside by security, but the friend, who had just come back from a camping trip and had a big camping knife on him, went right through security. It was really weird.

Why are there still so few leading parts for Asian-Americans?

The easy answer is that the producers probably don't want to take a risk, because the percentage of Asians in the U.S. is small - but we in the Asian community have to take some responsibility too, in that, unlike African Americans, who buy entertainment products geared specifically for them, Asian Americans haven't been that organized. Our buying habits are precisely that of white Americans. So there's no fiscal incentive to create products for us.